After Careful Consideration, I’ve Decided Not To Join The Hobbesian War Of All Against All

Thank you for the opportunity

Gentlemen, first, I want to thank you for the generous offer. I’d be lying if I said the package wasn’t compelling: unlimited license for wanton destruction and cruelty, boundless opportunities to steal and hoard as many precious resources as I can sensibly defend, the unique chance to recruit weak-minded, impressionable brutes to my banner and cut a path of desolation across the land. Seriously, you know how to make a guy feel wanted. However, after careful consideration, I’ve decided not to join the Hobbesian war of all against all.

I want you to know that I didn’t come to this conclusion in a rushed or cavalier fashion, and that I was genuinely tempted to say yes. For a couple reasons, though, I decided that—at the end of the day—joining a brother-against-brother, society-rending tournament of anarchy and violence just wasn’t the right fit for me.

Number one: I’m a consensus guy. Throughout my professional and personal life, I’ve focused on reaching across divides, knocking down walls, and bringing people together. See, I sort of look at interpersonal conflicts as this big, ugly thing that’s sitting between us, and that if we could just climb down from our fortresses and take a look at it from a different point of view, we’d probably find a lot to appreciate in the other guy’s position, and decide that the problem isn’t so intractable after all. In light of that, it just didn’t feel like—from a culture perspective—I’d be the right man for the job. Heck, if you put me in front of a muscle-bound, blood-spattered warlord twirling a nail-spiked baseball bat, I’m much more likely to ask if he wants to hash things out over a couple of cold beers than I am to engage him in combat!

Number two: Work-life balance. I tell you, in my younger days, the prospect of hopping into a souped-up, barbed-wire covered 4x4 and zipping around the countryside terrorizing the weak, pillaging what we needed, and sleeping wherever we dropped could have been really attractive. But I’m in my 40s now, and if I heard someone say, “We’re going to stake out a rival clan and strike at dawn to capture their stores of gasoline and ammunition,” my first thought would be, “Guess I don’t get to make the kids breakfast tomorrow morning.”

Plus, although we haven’t talked about it explicitly, it sounds like there’d be a lot of travel? I’m up for the one-off, once-a-year conference, but I can’t really do the roadshow thing.

Finally: Benefits. To be sure, your package has a lot of things that no one else is going to compete on. Plunder-matching up to six percent? The opportunity to stake out my own sovereign territory and launch a thousand-generation reign of carnage and domination? Not to talk out of school, but I can tell you Microsoft wasn’t offering that!

In other areas, though—and I hope you know I’m offering this in a spirit of collaboration, I do want to see you guys succeed—your offer falls pretty severely short of industry benchmarks. Even if we’re looking at—not totally sure what the closest comp would be here—mercenary firms, I can pretty much guarantee you that the guys at Blackwater are getting, minimum, a gym credit or something. And that’s not to mention my youngest will be looking at braces next year.

All in all, getting to know you and your team has been such a great experience, and I appreciate the time and energy on your end. Life is long and I’m sure our paths will cross again. Who knows? Maybe one day we’ll fight each other to the death.

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Notes:

• Why did I write this? Growing up, I always enjoyed comedians who would do big rants about low-importance annoyances (Seinfeld, Lewis Black, etc.). Nowadays, I guess I lean towards “extremely understated responses to ridiculous scenarios.”

• What I’m reading: Less reading again this week as I’ve been writing more, but enjoyed this very brief piece from a recent New Yorker, “The Popes That Trump Might’ve Liked”. Love learning about Popes!

• Happy Mother’s Day: Happy Mother’s Day! My numbers guy tells me Moms are The Libel’s strongest demographic—something about them reading it and saying, “Thank God that’s not my kid!” As my own Mom always told me, "as long as the money’s green!”