A couple months ago, I sold my Tesla stock and used the earnings from that sale to make donations to the EFF and ACLU. At the time, it felt like it was a bit of a dumb financial move, but it wasn’t much money and I was sure it would help me sleep at night, so I did it anyway. Turns out I did sleep better, and I sold real close to the peak of Tesla’s stock price, so go me. Also, suck it Elon. This week, I’m making another move that feels really similar, but an awful lot bigger.

Since starting my own consultancy two years ago, one of my primary contracts has been with a company that, among other things, manufactures military equipment and weapons. I’ve never been fully comfortable with this, but in the past I’ve been able to rationalize my choice pretty easily. I’m pretty far removed from that work, just helping with IT systems that support the business at large. Even though the systems I help make better DO facilitate the creation of these weapons, I could tell myself that between my remove from them and the fact that they were likely to be used in ethical ways, my hands were clean enough.

I started getting the ick with how the Biden administration was continuing to support Israel even though their response to the October 7th attacks pretty clearly came to constitute war crimes as they escalated. That can be a tough topic, but my stance on it is pretty simple. War crimes are bad, no matter who does them, and we shouldn’t be supporting countries that commit them. But, again, I was able to justify my continued involvement by balancing that against the support the administration gave Ukraine. Here, these weapons were helping a free people stand against an unjust aggressor. By my reckoning, that is the clearest definition of an ethical use of these kinds of weapons. I have no way to know if any of the weapons used in either of these conflicts were made with the support of systems I had a hand in shaping, but odds are very good some were. On balance I felt like things were still ok enough for me to continue, even though we were making some really significant mistakes as a nation.

But now, we have very different leaders, whose collective inner voices executed a suicide pact a couple decades ago. For the last 6 weeks or so especially I’ve really been struggling with focus and productivity and I’d been just chalking it up to the general stresses of living through 2025 as a leftist progressive. Watching so much the progress we’d made as a society towards compassion and justice get callously demolished is demoralizing. Seeing the masks truly come off our business and political leaders and seeing just how craven and cowardly they are is heartbreaking. Especially in a time where the it’s become clear that hard work and good faith has little connection to success. The only reliable predictors for that seem to be “have no moral compass” and “be rich already”, and seeing that embodied so vividly at the highest levels of our society wears on a person. I figured I was just burning out a bit. But recently I realized it’s more specific than that.

Someone in a meeting said something to the effect of, “We need to make sure the missile floor can stay running 24/7” and that statement just shook me. Images of a factory spitting out missiles all day and night for 47 to put to use because I helped make their computer systems reliable enough to do that rolled around in my head for days. I was kinda paralyzed as I wrestled with intrusive thoughts tied back to that off-the-cuff comment. That’s what made me realize I had to make a change, I had to get out.

So, I’m exiting the project. It will be tough financially. I’ve relied on this project for over half my income for the last couple of years, it really has been a cornerstone of my fledgling business. I’ve done work there I’m genuinely proud of. But not anymore. I had already set a goal for myself to become less reliant on this contract this year and start making moves to slowly shift away from it. Well, so much for slow.

Now, I have no illusions that this will actually change anything. My departure will at most be mildly annoying to the people I’m directly working with. Those missiles and whatever else will still be made. If the administration decides to use them to intentionally target innocent people, or sell them to some other dictator to commit war crimes, or escalate a conflict that sparks World War Three, that will still happen. I fully believe that the current leadership of the United States wouldn’t hesitate to do any of those things if they believed it could somehow be turned to serve their personal interest. I’m not moving the needle at the high level. But that’s not the point. The point is to reduce my emotional burden and create more space for me.

If all this move does is allow me to be a little bit happier, that will be enough. Maybe though it will allow me to apply my expertise to some other project that will move the needle in a truly meaningful way. The point is though that this is another step towards better aligning my professional life with my personal values.

It also highlights that not every piece of resistance has to be all-caps RESISTANCE. There are a lot of quotes from a lot of smart people that are along the line of “I won’t let the fact I can’t do everything interfere with my ability to do something”. I put this move in that bucket. It might be a small thing in the big picture, but it is something. Who knows though? It may turn out to be the key decision that does actually does change everything for me, there’s no way to know!

Is there something nagging at you? Something in your heart of hearts you wish you were doing different to be living your values more truthfully? Do it. I know it’s scary. I’m scared, but doing scary things is how we become who we’re supposed to be. This might be a stupid move financially, but I know I’ll sleep better at night.