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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I think there'll be a lot more late 20s, early 30s people in tech that quit to be funemployed with fun creative things
In the old days there were patrons to fund artists like Michelangelo
Now people are becoming their own patrons, funding their own creative pursuits with tech $
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The disproportionally high comp in STEM will draw in college students that would otherwise pursue creative stuff
The reality of the humanities major that ends up working as a barista to fund their creative pursuit is widely reported on
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The alternative path of (sometimes blindly) following the money to tech, realizing that the big $ is comfortable, but not fulfilling, and then building up a safety cushion to quit is less known but is getting more attention IMO
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Yes, much interesting discussion in the replies to
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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?
Show this thread