Quit your job?

should you?

it’s goose time

I feel some imposter syndrome talking about quitting my job. I had barely joined—I graduated from college, got a job, and quit around ten months later. The full-time employment arc of my life still had wheels on the runway when it crashed. If anything, I temporarily quit my normal life to have a job.

That said, what I quit was not only the job that I held for ten months, but rather an entire lifetime of the career assembly line. In spite of the short duration of my employment, I feel that quitting was one of the most important before/after moments of my life: it was when I decided to take full responsibility for myself, the first time I really felt like an adult. After several conversations with people looking to leave full-time work, and a lot of encouragement, I’ve decided to write this post dissecting the process of quitting.

Ask yourself the following questions.

Why are you motivated to quit?

There are a few common answers to this question. Some people feel like they don’t get to spend enough time doing the things they really care about. Some find their job meaningless and have trouble with motivation; others actively hate their job and/or their coworkers. Some have grand dreams about a different kind of life—an epic saga of adventure and glory. (that was me)

I think that these reasons are almost always wrong, in the sense that each reason is simply a story that a person has come up with in order to rationalize their emotions, and not the actual cause of those emotions. Often, the desire to quit your job comes from a deeper place—a sense that something is fundamentally wrong about your way of living (I’ll add some detail about this below). The job is the most obvious and powerful external force in most people’s lives, and therefore the first thing to take blame. That blame is usually misplaced.

This is the main source of my reluctance to recommend quitting to people. It almost never addresses the underlying problem. If, as I said, one is simply blaming the job for a deeper personal problem, quitting might just make your life considerably worse. You have all the problems you had before, and now you’re worried about money too. Wonderful.

There is the scenario where the job is aggravating an existing problem—anxiety is a good example. In that case, quitting will grant you a brief respite, and it can feel like a major breakthrough. The anxiety, however, will always come back in a different form. It’s never that easy to heal.

Back to the point about the sense that something about your life is deeply wrong: this feeling arises from ignoring your needs and desires in favor of externally-provided tasks and goals. It’s your mind reminding you that you need to listen to your intrinsic motivations if you want to feel satisfied. Often, especially in the context of careers, you choose to do things that you don’t really want to do, in service of money, status, or some long-term career goal. Worse, sometimes you do this out of fear—imagine paddling furiously to keep your head above water. My conviction is that ignoring your built-in motivations is really bad for you. It teaches your mind to suppress its own desires, since they get ignored anyway. Then you wonder: why don’t I get excited about anything anymore? And then you get burnout, meaninglessness, and depression. (I wrote a bit about a related topic in North.)

To summarize: don’t be satisfied by the first or second answer that your mind produces in response to the above question. Look deeper.

I guess I need to address the substance of those responses, though. What if you actually want to spend more time on things you care about? What if you want to have an adventure?

You’ll need to judge yourself on this one, but here’s what I would ask: Are you at the limit of what you can do with the time and energy that you have? That is, given that you work full-time, are you trying your hardest to seek out those things that you allegedly value? For example, if you want to quit your job to become a youtuber, are you recording and uploading whenever you can make the time? If you want an adventure, do you make an effort to travel? To have mini-adventures on the weekends? To find the sparkling moments of adventure that are inevitably scattered throughout the life you already have?

What I’m trying to point out is that you might be tricking yourself about what you want to do instead of working. I can’t tell from over here, but you should be honest with yourself about that possibility.

Should you quit?

There is an obvious practical aspect to this: don’t starve, think a little bit about money beforehand, etc.—but that’s not the meat of the discussion. This question is really about whether you should abandon the life path that you’re on in favor of some amorphous, handmade alternative.

If you considered your motivations, as per the previous question, and found them to be pure and honest—go for it.

If you realized that your job is simply the rotten cherry on top of the twisted cake of misery and suffering that is your life, then… think twice. Your life will probably get somewhat worse; suddenly, you’ll have seven full days a week to wonder what the hell it is that you’re doing. If you were doubting yourself before, this is enough to cause full-blown panic.

There is also the fact that if you agree that your job itself is not the problem, then you don’t necessarily need to quit to resolve your issues. You could try to address them directly, however that looks—you can learn to deal with anything as long as you’re aware of its existence.

---

Okay, I’ve said whatever responsible-adult-Sid wanted to say about this question. Now let me put on a different hat—pirate-king-Sid has an opinion too.

Jobs are authoritarian. To work full-time is to silently accept the fact that you need to be told what to do in order to survive in the world. This is an insane default; before signing away your productive hours, did you even try following your own intuition? Or did fear prevent you from considering that choice?

I’m reminded of a quote from Dune that someone skillfully paired with a Calvin and Hobbes strip:

from here

When you quit, you affirm your confidence in your ability to determine your own course. “I am the captain of my soul” and all that. It’s worth quitting your job just to prove to yourself that you’re capable of making your own choices, in spite of discouragement from family, friends, and society, without anyone’s permission. That experience alone empowers you immensely—after quitting, I had nobody else to blame for my problems, and I was able to accept responsibility for them.

One other fallacy: people often expect that, upon obediently performing the duties of their career, they’ll be presented with a meaningful, pleasant, happy life. This has never been true; the only kind of life you can buy ready-made is an average one. It has always been up to individuals to look out for themselves—nobody else knows your heart well enough to make the right choices for you, and very few people care.

What do I do after I quit?

Things are about to get very interesting. You are now free to follow your own motivations, but you’ll probably have to spend some time (took me six months) learning how to notice what those motivations are. No idea is too small or too ridiculous. I spent several consecutive days in the SF botanical garden trying to find similarities between plants, so that I’d have an intuitive understanding of taxonomy. I wrote some websites and scrapped them. I wrote some stuff on this blog and on my website. I met up with random people from Twitter, some of whom became close friends. I road-tripped through south Mexico. Anything goes, really—just try to figure out, of all the things you believe that you care about, which ones are really, deeply yours.

It’s likely that, in the process of following your motivations, you’ll encounter a situation that requires you to make a choice that feels as drastic as quitting; something that gives you a chance to change everything about your life. As it turns out, those choices are everywhere, and have been around you for your entire life. You were ignoring them, but now that you’ve quit, the blinders are off. Heed the call of adventure—if you make it to other end, you’ll grow in ways you can barely imagine.

Be cautious when thinking about money. It can warp your motivations in insidious ways, and before you know it you’re making a product or building a business. Stop. Is that really what you want, or are you acting out of fear again? Wasn’t the point of quitting your job to do what you wanted to? (more on this here)

I think this section deserves its own post, so I’ll leave it at that for now.

What if I regret it?

Are you seriously going to regret a decision that you made on your own volition using all of the information and self-understanding that you had at the time? That’s kind of cringe. There is nothing else you could have done.

The end

Jump. you won’t