The reason to “quit your job” (metaphorically or literally) isn’t to wallow in carefree hedonism: it’s to discover and honor a richer and more personal sense of purpose, to take your own ideas seriously along no one’s axis of value but your own.
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People who quit often feel pressure to “start something”, to “succeed”. But those pressures are about others’ default ideas of purpose. You haven’t cultivated your own telos yet. For that, you need to time spent engaging with your impulses—playfully, non-instrumentally.
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Many people frame quitting in terms of working a job for oneself: “I’m going full-time on my coaching practice!” That may be more fun, but this isn’t quitting your job in the fullest sense. The aim is wide-open space, cultivation of instinct, freedom from the tug of obligation.
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The deeper problem with quitting in order to do something well-defined is that you’ll be limited to paths you can clearly articulate from within your current world—that is, the confining context of a job. The most meaningful paths probably aren’t on that menu.
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This line of reasoning nicely echoes 's excellent “Becoming a Magician”, which defines extraordinary growth in terms of becoming a version of yourself which seems impossible, even alien. What got you here won’t get you there. autotranslucence.wordpress.com/2018/03/30/bec
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One important claim Wolf makes is that yes, of course, stepping off a well-defined career track requires a great deal of privilege. But many—most?—of the people who *could* take that leap wrongly think of it as a fairy-tale, something only “other people” could do.
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I don’t know how true this is. Obviously there are huge practical barriers for even many quite wealthy people, as I learned in the many excellent replies to the thread below. But it’s not totally untrue either. I needed a lot of cajoling to take the leap.
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This question's gauche, but: given the prevalence of $400k++ comp packages for ~30-year-olds in Big Tech, why aren't there lots more "gentle[wo]man scholars"? i.e. people quitting to do non-remunerative creative projects
I can think of some, but shouldn't there be thousands?
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In any case, Wolf correctly argues that one common reason people don’t quit is that they—correctly!—lack faith in their ideas. Their instincts seem weak because, often, they are. You have to give them a chance to grow: “you get good ideas from years of hard leisure.”
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This makes me more optimistic about the recent surge of small grants (eg Emergent Ventures). “You’ll fund me for 3-12 months…but then what?!” Seems iffy if judged by how well it can launch well-defined projects. But maybe very promising for cultivating highly personal instincts.
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All this seems awfully selfish—and in a real sense it *needs* to be, to cultivate your own sense of purpose. But Wolf argues (and I agree) that many important kinds of progress depend on insights which emerged from this kind of idiosyncratic "hard leisure".
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This is an excellent prompt!
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The only thing that comes to mind honestly is this genre of book
read image description
ALT
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Thanks for sharing! That was the essay I wanted to write for a long time :). It's shifted my own views on my journey.
To answer the prompt you shared:
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Replying to @joeld
As someone who did something similar, and pursued excitement/traveled/sabbatical'd for a number of years, I think you'll find that ~99% of people who can do this, are already very safe and can really only benefit. Anyone who isn't ... doesn't do it in the first place.
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Andy, this articulated my feelings for the past 3 months. I quit my job two months ago and I didn’t have anything lined up. I told people I was searching to find what I really wanted. This breakdown could not have been a better encapsulation of how I feel.
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