The Copper Handcuffs

This week, I saw a video of people stealing from the LCBO (the only liquor store in Ontario). It made me remember how when I used to work there, management actually instructed employees not to intervene when someone was stealing. It also reminded me of a former LCBO employee who was let go for failing to report a colleague who had an altercation with one of these thieves.

That was a tough time for that person. They had been let go from a decent stable job that they had held for years. Sure, they had been a little unhappy, but never felt like leaving would have made any sense. Life wasn't great, but it could have been a lot worse. So why go through the effort of updating the resume, searching, applying, interviewing, in order to seek something different?

That all changed when they got let go. In the end, what seemed like a devastating failure became a success story, because that same person is now thriving in a completely different career.

This anecdote is significant because of its pattern. It aligns very closely to the career trajectory I went through in my mid-twenties. It's a phenomenon I call the "copper handcuffs".

A Pattern Worth Naming

This is a story about what it means to be a young person in Canada right now. It is a question of what happens when you strive to do more, to be better, to make yourself master of your own domain. Most of all, it is an argument for taking risks, something that is desperately needed in Canada's current economy.

That culture-sponsored aversion is a big problem. Especially for people who work for big institutions, corporations, and government.

Conventional wisdom in this country is that the best thing you can do is get a government job. Those jobs get you a pension, and for the rest of your life, you have it made. While this means that your individual floor is rather high, that mindset makes it really challenging to actually grow our country. Because the other side of that coin is that it disincentivizes entrepreneurship.

Most people do not have the trust and confidence in themselves to believe they could be better, or that they could be great. You see this mindset everywhere, especially in young people who are holding on to copper handcuff jobs because they are terrified of the alternative.

The Year I Worked One Hour a Day

When I was about 25, I was working an entry-level job at TIFF, the Toronto International Film Festival. I was earning $35,000 a year in the fundraising department. After a couple of years, I got offered a contract at a different corporation. It was a significant jump, up to $50,000. I felt ecstatic, rich, even. Going from $35K to $50K as a single guy living in a dinky China Town apartment. It was a massive step.

I had been brought on to that new organization as a business sales consultant, but it essentially amounted to a data entry job. I was on a team of eight people supporting the sales staff, most of whom had been with the company for a long time. It was a master class in corporate culture: keep your head down, don't rattle any cages.

Because I grew up around and was decent with technology, I could do my work fast. Much faster than my peers. They were taking five times as long to do the same tasks. I got paid by the hour, and had no incentive to ask for more work. This meant that I had a lot of free time. This also happened to be right around the time people started being allowed to work from home. Most of the team were commuters from the GTA, so the team didn't come in unless explicitly asked to. Lucky me got to work in that dinky apartment in my PJs.

While seeming like a boon, the issue was that I was finishing my work in about an hour, and getting paid for eight. For $50,000 a year, from a private corporation, that sounds like a great deal on paper. And for a while, it was.

My routine became something like this: wake up at 8:59 AM, log on, go get a coffee, come back, and do one hour of work. By 10:30 at the latest, I was done for the day. Waiting by the phone, waiting for something to occur. I learned that no matter how hard I tried, I got paid the same amount. After a while, I started filling the time by playing video games. Eventually, once I became comfortable that there were no consequences for only doing one hour of work a day, I added another wrinkle: by 10:30, I would be smoking a joint and getting stoned, playing Final Fantasy, and maybe grabbing some Dim Sum.

That was my life for about a year. Wake up. Coffee. Work for an hour. Smoke weed. Play video games. Rinse and repeat.

On any given day? Fantastic. Who wouldn't want to put one hour in, kick back, get paid, and get good reviews? But as time went on, you start to understand what is actually happening to you. A slow decline into a trap mired in meaninglessness. Because I was firmly locked into copper handcuffs.

People talk about the golden handcuffs: jobs at big law firms or Google, where the pay is so good you just can't bring yourself to leave. No matter how much abuse you take, long hours, time away from the family, you'll stick around for the money. The copper handcuffs follow the same logic with different variables on the effort, time, and rewards. The arithmetic at the time was simple: a 25-year-old making $50,000 a year for one hour of work. Pretty good.

That right there is the fundamental problem. I was locked in. I was in such a comfortable situation, that I couldn't see that I was just damaging myself. I was burning days of my life for a relatively small amount of money. I was gaining no experience, I was not learning, I was not making decisions. That has long-term consequences, because it sets you back in life and career in ways that are not immediately visible.

Eventually I felt a little stalled, but still — why would anyone leave that situation? They wouldn't. And I didn't.

Luckily, after about a year, the organization got new leadership. My entire department was cut. As a contractor, I was not brought back. As scary and awful as that was, to be out of work — a huge part of me was relieved. I knew it was the right thing, and knew it would be good for me in the long run.

Had that not happened, I wouldn't have been forced into discomfort. I wouldn't have spent a few months struggling and reevaluating where I was going. I might not have turned things around, gotten a job where I was actually providing value, learning, growing. It was only after that I was able to kick-start my career and move forward. Getting let go from that job was probably the best thing that ever happened to me.

You Don't Really Work for Your Company

The LCBO story and mine are ostensibly the same story: you go to work at a big organization with a great reputation. But once you're inside, you don't necessarily reap the benefits — you give that corporation much more than you get. For the young, they are buying your prime. They are buying the years in your twenties when you could be learning, growing, failing, and picking up real responsibility. Getting some experience is fine. But if you are not growing beyond that, what is the point?

This is a question every young person should be asking themselves about where they work these days and who they work for.

Because the truth is, you don't work for the LCBO or whatever big corporation that employs you. You work for your boss. If that boss is just a middle manager who has been coasting for fifteen years, then that is a serious problem. You are going to end up being shaped by the person who controls your professional life. That's the place where most of us spend the majority of our waking hours. So as a starting point — take a look at the person you work for. If you do not want to be like that person one day, then that is a signal worth paying attention to.

Don't be afraid, the data is clear: people who stand up for themselves, demand more of their institutions, and push back more often, are better off in the long run. In the case of the contact of mine who got fired from the LCBO, they "fell up" into that new, more successful, higher ceiling career. They almost certainly would not have left the "stable" job they had. It's not ingrained in Canadians culturally, the perceived risks were too great.

Good Enough Is the Enemy of Great

This reflects a fundamental truth about the philosophy of our citizens. We have trained people to be more afraid of what they will lose than to focus on what they could gain. We are in an era of anxiety and worry, and our culture reinforces that fear until we end up harming ourselves through overinsulation. It holds people back. It keeps people down.

It is well-meaning. That government job, that security, that stability is understandable. But "good enough" is the enemy of "great", especially when you are young and you have the potential to be more.

On the other hand, when you have a population that is focused on what we could gain — when we are thinking about opportunity and growth — failure is just a quicker path to success. In sales, this can be looked at as the idea that every "no" gets you closer to a "yes". When you try, and fail, and feel the awful feelings that come with rejection, you arrive at the new paradigm faster. That is how you build velocity. In the tech world, they call this failing fast.

Copper handcuffs are the antithesis of this. They hold people down and keep them contained in a context that is just good enough they aren't incentivized to make a change. If you were making half a million dollars in a dead-end role, at least you would be so far ahead financially that it might eventually make sense. But linear corporate jobs, the ones that trap young people early and leave them with cost of inflation raises over years? They pale in comparison to what could be attained with a little bit of risk. It's not even close.

A Different World

One of the fundamental issues is that our culture is built on an education system and conventional wisdom that doesn't reflect the modern context. The model has served and benefited people who were able to get way ahead, and now are pensioned, property owning, secure, and naturally risk-averse.

So we can understand why they would be espousing the same values and strategies that made them successful. But this model gears our system towards playing it safe without reflecting a commensurate benefit. We should be promoting individuals to play to their strengths, teach them how to build things, how to get better jobs, and how to take calculated risks.

But that old model prevails, and the advice that comes from that generation can send the wrong signals.

Input from those who have walked before is vital. It should absolutely be sought out and considered. But too often, well-meaning mentors are drawing on a lived experience that is meaningfully different. The context has changed.

The cultural programming that still lingers was built in a time of abundance and advantage for Canadians. There was stability, affordable housing, and pensions were a standard part of most jobs. Those conditions are no longer applicable. There is a significant gap between the world that our elders navigated and the one that young Canadians are trying to navigate today.

That is the lesson: seek the advice from people who have gone before, but make sure you apply it to your context. Examine the underlying assumptions. Understand that the conditions may have fundamentally changed. Advice is advice — it is not doctrine.

Take Off the Handcuffs

Conventional wisdom is what enables the copper handcuffs. Young people get locked in, and never even realize that they can consider an alternative. They are taking society's advice, walking in the path that is well travelled, and unaware that they are in a professional bind.

The institutions designed to help Canadians prosper may no longer be fulfilling their mandate. The jobs that feel safe may be costing young professionals years they will never get back. The advice given and received, however well-intentioned, may have been calibrated for a world that no longer exists.

Failure is uncomfortable. But it is the most effective teacher that humans have. When you are young, with time on your side and a long horizon ahead of you — that is exactly when you should be willing to fail. That's when to take risks. To trust yourself.

If you do that, you can remove those copper handcuffs before you forget you are wearing them.