Three months ago, I turned 30 years old. A month before my 30th birthday, I ended my ten-year career as an external union organizer, ending my decade-long quest of long hours, long months, long years finding pissed off workers and leading them to fight for and win labor unions at their workplaces.

The labor movement got me started young.

When I think back to how my political journey all started, I see mental vignettes with sometimes incredible detail. In no particular order, I see a thousand “Occupy Los Angeles” protestors attempting to enter the city’s ports, up and clashing against a line of hundreds of police, dozens of armored vehicles, and more flares and tear gas lighting up the early morning sky than I can possibly count. I see the condensation of my breath in the cold winter air, inside my tent, which I know is surrounded by dozens of other tents — we are at the University of California, Davis, occupying our campus’ quad, protesting tuition hikes. Later that night, I would awaken suddenly to the sound of the fabric of my tent tearing, counter-protestors using what in my memory are long knives to cut up our tents. I felt so much terror. Other memories are less violent/destructive, of course. Not everything was broken windows. I remember a planning meeting, five close friends way too drunk, trying to figure out how to start a campus chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, and feeling so close, so much love, knowing in my heart that I’d never lose touch with my four other comrades.

I remember these vignettes (& more) with lots of detail — but more than a decade later, I confess that on a visceral level, it all… *feels* distant. (I confess that of the four comrades I started a campus chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America with, today I’m only in touch with one, and not closely.)

Which is strange to me. These mental vignettes represent some of the most powerful, soul-defining moments of my life — and, like, I *lived* these experiences. These experiences once felt way beyond deep, and I felt so powerfully connected with them, and I felt defined by them, deep into my nerve-endings.

***

In 2011, terms like “social justice warrior” existed, but the term wasn’t as pervasive in the culture as it is now. Same thing with the word “woke.” Back then, we were the ones defining what it meant to be a woke social justice warrior.

In 2011, 18y.o. Ian was full of rage. For a brief moment, I had green hair. I spouted blunt, angry diatribes that people who watch Fox News would have thought I would make.

Nowadays, I find young woke social justice warriors’ analysis of the world to be naive and simple. Sometimes I find young woke social justice warrior’s analysis to be a little stupid.

But the rage. The being of it. The being *in it*. That was real. I miss that.

Sometimes, 30y.o. me — with his stable union communications job, with his political media business, making more money than he ever could have imagined as a kid, comfortable and more-or-less at peace — looks at the world, the world with all its death and inequities and meaningless and gratuitous displays of totalizing domination, and says, how are we not angry? How am I not as angry as I used to be?

Collectively, it feels strange that we are as calm as we are.

***

My well-earned cynicism with The-Thing-Of-It-All aside, I still (perhaps too) sincerely believe that workers forming unions is the strongest structural way we have to fight back. Capital has Capital; normal working folk only have one another and the social structures we build together. External union campaigns that focus on hundreds or thousands of workers at a time — as opposed to political campaigns that have to focus on hundreds of thousands or millions of people — have much more potential to be transformative, as by necessity an external union organizer has to have lots of long-form conversations with a limited number of people over an extended but finite period of time.

During my decade as an external union organizer, I observed up-close-and-personal a lot of different unions attempting a lot of different strategies to facilitate workers forming unions. Still, the question remains, how do we accelerate unionization on a mass scale, especially at the rate we need to? No one sincerely knows the answer. (Anyone who speaks confidently on this with definitive answers is either lying or a narcissist.) Despite the recent resurgence of the labor movement we are all presently seeing, last year national unionization levels dropped from 11.6% to 11.2%.

***

In the last decade or so, I’ve tried a lot of different ways of engaging politically. For a long while, I was a leader in the Sacramento chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. I’ve participated in community-focused field campaigns. Realizing that liberal policy is largely controlled by a handful of people you might refer to as the “consultant class,” I even for a time joined the Board of a non-profit dedicated to training up young folks of this consultant class, attempting in my own way to build relationships and organize within that establishment.

All these attempts at engaging politically had their pros and cons. I learned a lot doing each. In my experience, these approaches to engaging politically were each motivated by a lot of different forces, the vast majority of which I like to believe were good-faith. Even within the consultant class. Obviously, none are the Singular Solution.

***

When I was 19 years old, I took a paid internship with AFSCME Local 3299, the union that represents service and tech employees at the University of California. I was an “Organizing Intern.” This internship set in motion my entire career. Because of relationships I made during this internship, I eventually ended up running the field campaign for a municipal minimum wage ordinance, and that led to my first “real” union job, which led me to external organizing with SEIU.

When I first took the union internship, though, I had a few of my closest friends at the time confront me, angrily. They felt that unions were an institution embedded in the neoliberal structure of it all and that I was selling out. Today I know that the idea that “unions are institutions embedded in the neoliberal structure” is in many ways true, but not in the ways that teenage radicals actually know or understand. Anyway, I haven’t spoken to those few friends who confronted me since. At the time, losing those friends hurt. A lot.

***

There’s an off-hand joke in comedian Julie Klausner’s memoir about her friend that has stuck with me: “He understood that only those who’ve been balls-deep in super-earnest ideology are really able to laugh heartily in the faces of its most orthodox devotees. It’s just a question of growing out of being sad all the time.”

But I don’t know that growing out of sadness — or anger — is actually, in the final analysis, like, “appropriate.”

***

It is hard for me to believe anything other than the truth: 18y.o. Ian would think that present-day Ian was a career sell-out. I am well-off. I do not struggle. I literally own a small business, and I like to think it’s doing well.

For much of my 20s — more than I care to admit — I found myself in conversation with 18y.o. Ian. Today, 18y.o. Ian feels so distant. Sometimes I worry I am not taking care of him. I know, at the very least, that his extreme, sincere anger at the world was correct.

And I also don’t know what to do about it. I don’t think any of us do.

I guess this has been a bit of a bummer of an essay. I assure you I’m doing OK, even as I sit with these feelings. I think that’s what we have to do, is just sit with our feelings. Well, that, and as cliché as it sounds: organize.

Thank you for reading.