Quit Your Job
You’re rich enough. Just do it, coward.
In the first of a two-part series of essays on quitting your job, the author examines the peculiar feeling of wanting to blow it all up and leave.
It’s 9:05am and you feel the dread setting in. “Damnit, I can usually get to 10am. I haven’t even had my coffee. I never get this feeling so early!”
Everybody feels it from time to time:¹ the subtle (or not so subtle) urge to tell everyone you work with to go f**k themselves and quit your job. Maybe it’s a passing mood, but maybe there’s something to your ever-present ennui.
Quitting is more practical now than it ever has been. There’s less social stigma with quitting. Changing jobs, taking breaks, and switching careers is more commonplace. For the better, the world is more accepting of alternate lifestyles and work-styles. The Wall Street Journal endlessly fills my inbox with articles about everyone quitting their jobs.
So, why not you? Should you quit your job?
A Brave New World
The first thing to realize is that you can quit your job. “Well, duh. Of course, I can quit my job,” you say. No, really. You actually can. Not in some la-dee-da, pie-in-the-sky, tell-your-friends-at-the-bar kind of way, but in reality. In fact, you could probably quit tomorrow, and everything would be fine. I’m not advocating for that (yet), but solely knowing that you could quit is eye-opening.
Earlier this month, I wrote about moments that feel surreal. Here’s one:
When you’re between jobs and recognize in a brief instance of clarity that you could change industries, or move to Costa Rica, or not have a job at all.
The openness I’ve discussed before in this newsletter is an ever-present reality that we look away from. We do things like “jobs” to distract ourselves from the sheer scope possibility. Plugging away at our various widgets in our self-created boxes is necessary to live a productive life, but it’s an autogenic fantasy. If we live in a Matrix, it’s only the one we make for and by ourselves. The feeling of quitting urges us to peek out of our little box and see the landscape outside.
You’re not an accountant. You’re not a husband. You’re not you. You just are.
It Doesn’t Matter
Realizing that you can quit can help your mental state, too.
Let’s say it’s a Thursday night and you just spent the day in back-to-back meetings where a bunch of idiots asked you questions and insulted you in corporate-speak. It’s late, and you have one more meeting to go in a time zone where it’s already tomorrow. You accepted this call to be polite because this team has questions, but they end up roasting you for an hour about a project that you just took over. How could these problems be your fault when you were assigned this two weeks ago? You feel like you’re burning bridges that you never even got a chance to cross.
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What should you do in this situation? You can worry about how this new bunch of idiots now thinks you’re an idiot. Or you can be anxious about how your manager will perceive this situation. Or you could be angry that the team is blaming you for something that’s not your fault. Or…you could stop giving a f**k. After all, you can quit this job, anyway. It really doesn’t matter.² Let the burdens roll off your shoulders like waves crashing into the sand.
When I started out in business,³ I often worried about my colleagues’ perception of me, felt anxiety about my performance, and grew angry at the litany of injustices present in the village politics of a city bureau. It was all for nothing in the end. After I left, it made no difference that I allowed myself to feel bad when things went wrong. If I had analyzed the situations I found myself in dispassionately, I would’ve felt better and likely would’ve done better too. Letting go doesn’t mean to stop working. You should still work, and learn, and test yourself. Rather, the prospect of quitting permits you disassociate yourself from that which you cannot control.
Feel the negativity for a moment, let it guide you, and move on.
Practical Considerations
Now, just because you realize you can quit your job doesn’t mean you should quit your job. I respect the need for things like food, shelter, and clothing.⁴ However, for many in the professional managerial class, (the ones who might read an article like this one) the problem isn’t a matter of meeting the bare necessities. The problem of the office ennui I describe here is a status anxiety, self-schema, comfort in sameness problem. And, I would argue, it’s your duty as an so-called elite to break free of those problems.⁵
Assuming all the basic needs are settled,⁶ it’s time to join the ranks of the nouveau riche and begin your quarter-life crisis, asking foremost if you should quit your job.
Falling Asleep
There are, of course, straightforward reasons to quit your job like ditching a horrible boss, finding a new position with more money, or moving to a new city with a strange lover. You already know to quit in all these situations, so we won’t concern ourselves with the boilerplate reasons, though they’re all perfectly good reasons to quit.
I am specifically concerned with the roles where the ennui is delicate enough to notice being hurt, but not painful enough to force a radical change — where the push of inertia gives the appearance of moving while standing still, and a blanket of complacency settles over you, lulling you to sleep.
More on this tomorrow.
- Or, in your case, every waking moment of every day.
- To be technical, it does matter. In a strange way, everything in life is totally meaningless and at the same time bursting with meaning. What I mean here is it doesn’t matter in the sense of being a worthy cause of suffering. You already sat through the awful meeting. If you can help it, let the negativity pass. It’s enough to be hurt once; don’t hurt yourself twice.
- And today!
- For what it’s worth, I am a believer that money can solve your problems. If your problem is not being able to pay your rent, money will solve it. If your problem is not having enough money to buy your kids nutritious meals, money will solve it. If your problem is not being able to send your kid to college, money will solve it. However, if your problem is a sense of insecurity, or a lack of close friendships, or a meaningless life, money will not solve your problems. It may indeed make them worse.
- If you’re an elite and you don’t even enjoy it, what’s the point? Just be poor and give the money to a poor person. Greedy f**k.
- This section is called ‘Practical Considerations,’ but did you really expect a practical guide? Oh, well, here goes: make an emergency fund, interview for new jobs before quitting your old (if you intend to stay in the job schema), save for retirement I guess, and all the rest of it. Am I your mother?
Originally published at https://shitstack.substack.com.
