I deserve to have deeply satisfying relationships.’ I deserve to have deeply satisfying work. This job may not be a Dickensian workhouse, but I deserve better. You also call quitting an ‘act of love.’ What do you mean by that? So, which neurons fire to propel you into that quitting moment? You might contemplate quitting your job for years, but there has to be that one moment when you do it. While there might be a great cloud of history that goes before we quit something, there has to be that moment of decision. What happens inside our brains when we make a decision to abandon one path?… What are the chemical and electrical triggers that initiate stopping one kind of behavior and doing another? I discovered in my research that an emerging focus of neuroscience is the science of quitting. You write that the new science of giving up can set you free. That seemed to be how the interviews were going far more often. It was sold to people, like cars and cornflakes and smartphones.īut you also talked to people who said how happy they were as a result of quitting, and how it changed their life. If you didn’t, you’d end up rolling around in the gutter with a bottle of gin. We were told explicitly that if you worked hard, you would be successful. I really think that started back in the 19th century when material success was connected to hard work. There’s definitely that connotation: You’re a loser. I interviewed people who said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t call it quitting. Most people I interviewed regret the things they should have quit but didn’t, rather than the things that they did quit.Įverybody has a quitting story, but people hate the word quitting. What were the themes you heard from the people you interviewed? Things have worked out for her, but it’s been a great struggle. But she had three children and said: ‘I know the statistics about single mothers raising children, what happens to them economically, socially, culturally.’ The marriage was disintegrating it became very toxic. Her first book was a memoir about leaving her marriage. One of the people in the book was a college classmate of mine, Michelle Weldon we went to Northwestern together. It’s that moment of quitting when we go from one thing to another. So, it’s often small things upon which our lives can turn. It was like: ‘What are you doing? You’ve trained for this! You have all this!’īut she’s really very happy and credits one dog she adopted, a stray she found who was near death and who she nursed back to health. She gave up a job at Cleveland Clinic and said her family was just aghast. To cut to the chase, she now is a director of one of the large animal shelters in the Cleveland area. But she just wasn’t quite there.Īnd she had been volunteering at an animal shelter. One of my favorite interviews in the book was a woman who was the head of the cardiac unit at Cleveland Clinic. You interviewed 150 people about their quitting experiences. Read: Americans are ‘more afraid of running out of money than death’ So, my own quitting history is like all of ours. Other jobs, I’ve left maybe a little bit before I should have or maybe stayed a little bit too long. The quitting was good, the method of quitting was bad. So, in a great fit of bravado, I quit that job - didn’t give notice, which I think is a terrible thing to do. The very first job I had was at a small newspaper in Ashland, Kentucky, and they were paying me less than a quarter of what they were paying the man who’d done the exact same job before me. People I know who are ‘retired,’ and I’m using dreadful air quotes there, do more now than they ever did during their so-called working lives.” “It’s doing many different things, instead of just one thing. There isn’t this line of demarcation where you turn in your keys for your desk at IBM and go home and sit around the house and play pickleball,” said Keller, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, novelist and former Chicago Tribune book critic. “Almost everybody I know now who is of age, that’s just what they’ve done. Read: ‘You don’t want to die at your desk sending an email.’ Beyond the numbers, are you ready to retire? It’s about letting some things go, but not letting everything go.Īs Keller told me when I interviewed her by Zoom in her Ohio home, unretirement - when you quit a job in your 60s or so to work part-time and use newfound free time to do other things - is a great example of quasi-quitting. That’s a kind of precision quitting, when you leave a full-time job with the intention of going off in a different direction.
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