Courage to Quit
Is it brave to take a career break?
I recently decided to take a career break. Many of my friends called me brave for making that choice. The word stuck with me, because I don’t think of myself as particularly brave. So is it courageous to quit your job?
A few years ago when I turned 40, the world was in the middle of a black swan event. The COVID pandemic had turned our lives upside down and forced us to do something we had avoided for a long time: confronting our own mortality. Predictably, turning 40 in the middle of the pandemic triggered a mid-life crisis in me. I started wondering if this is all there is to life. Will I ever find meaning in all this? And what exactly is the meaning of life?
So I spent the next few years reading, contemplating, and doing some self-reflection. There’s much more I will say about this in coming posts, but a big question lingered front and center: Is my job giving me the meaning I crave? Actually, scratch that. Meaning is a tall order. I started smaller. Is what I’m doing for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, giving me anything other than a paycheck? If not, is the paycheck worth it? And if it is giving me something more, like say camaraderie with my coworkers, is it possible to get that outside of a job? As they say in corporate slang, and is the ROI worth it? Because there is a clear trade-off. I am giving up 40+ hours a week, a lot of mental space and physical energy to get whatever I am getting.
Funny thing about the word “job.” It’s dreary by definition. It implies obligation and routine. Re-framing it as “work” or “occupation” doesn’t help either. “Work” evokes productivity and accomplishments. And “occupation” just sounds like something you do to occupy your time.
But why should we be more productive? Why are accomplishments necessary? Do we really need something so rigid to fill our days, when time is the only true resource we have?
There’s a quiet pushback happening across the world against the norms of work.
FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) is making people dream of escaping the rat race. I stumbled onto the FIRE movement when just trying to learn personal finance. The idea resonated with me as it helped me look at work with a different lens. FIRE is a complex topic we should explore another time as I am not sure early retirement is for me.
In China, Lying Flat emerged as a response to relentless societal expectations. I found the imagery compelling: overworked employees physically resisting expectations by literally lying flat on the ground and not hustling to do more and more. In 2021, we also saw the Great Resignation in US, a large increase in number of people quitting their job voluntarily. By 2022, we were talking about Quiet Quitting and bai lan — a more despondent form of rejection of societal expectation.
People seem to be waking up to the idea that work shouldn’t consume life. Work-life balance doesn’t work. Most of our waking hours go into getting ready for work, going to work, working, coming back from work, and then…….. decompressing from work. Weekends are for recovering from the work week and prepping for the next one. Among all this work, where’s the living? Vacations offer a short reprieve, if we're not checking emails and Slack the whole time. Sure, you can "work hard and party harder", but even there the “work-fun balance” is skewed heavily towards work.
So, what’s the solution? Life, unfortunately, isn’t cheap. We can’t all just quit. (Though I’m still reading Walden to see if maybe we can.) And there’s something to be said about the good things work offers. Camaraderie, intellectual stimulation, physical movement, a sense of purpose (however empty), a routine, growth, a sense of achievement and of course, a paycheck. But to truly enjoy work I think we need to make space to explore life outside of it. One way is by taking career breaks regularly.
Sabbatical or career breaks are not looked at very positively in our world right now. Future prospective employers might wonder if there was something wrong with the individual to have left a well-paying job. Did they get fired? Did they have trouble working for their manager, their team or the employer? And will they quit again? A career break also needs a very supportive family and friends. And it can be an extremely risky move to take the financial hit if done without serious forethought.
For me, I loved my job. I was well paid in a good job with a good team in a good company with good future. But I also have two young kids and a busy household. I had also worked continuously since graduating from school and never taken a break. And work, while good, was not fun anymore. I needed a change. It was also fairly stressful and kept me busy. This meant that I could not get the mental stimulation and variety I needed outside of work. So, while risky, it was a risk worth taking for me.
Was it brave? Maybe. Doing something out of the ordinary takes guts, and this felt like one of the bravest things I’ve done. But I know I’m not alone. There are many others in the same boat, contemplating and re-evaluating.
To those of you who are ready, welcome to the unscheduled life, even if just for a while.