All week, we’d been rehearsing how my friend should leave her job. Specifically, where to land her resignation speech on the spectrum between a cathartic, spite-filled rant and something more businesslike. She was quitting because the money was terrible, the hours were terrible, it was incredibly stressful and she felt constantly gaslit and undermined by a boss who while giving her a dumb assignment would assure her it was consolidating her “brand”. We could rake over her motivation until the cows came home, but her reasons for quitting basically boiled down to one thing: “I’ve had a gutful,” she said (she’s Australian).
In the last year, the urge to quit has jumped from a staple background whinge to a startling mass action. In November last year in the US, the number of people leaving their jobs reached a record high of 4.53 million. These were not people working in finance. For the most part, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics, the highest concentration of workers walking out of their jobs fell in the leisure and hospitality industry, shortly followed by retail workers – that is, in the middle to lower wage brackets. Surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center found the reasons people cited for leaving were low pay, feeling stuck and “disrespect”. In other words, nothing out of the ordinary. But where in previous years these kinds of discomforts might have been weathered indefinitely, or until a better option came along, now people were snapping and walking out.
My friend who was quitting had plenty of plans but no solid job offer to go to. She was quitting cold, unable to stand it for a second longer, which seemed to be the pattern elsewhere. Another friend quit her job a few weeks ago, somewhat to her own surprise. When I asked what had prompted it, she said, “the pandemic distilled things to the core attributes”, and mentioned the effect of all those months at home giving her more time to think. An exhausted labour force is, generally, a more compliant one than workers who have a little time and space to take stock. Furthermore, said my friend, any employer who had not “displayed full empathy” during the pandemic appeared guilty of something much worse than bad management.
If we have all been through the equivalent of a collective near-death experience, the urge to embrace a radical life change makes sense. In the US, pandemic relief payments from the federal government gave people a small amount of “fuck you” money. And the thrill of being on the other side of something as large as an entire world that shut down is a head-rush it’s hard to ignore. Quitting hasn’t been the only expression of this feeling. Relative to the sheer scale of the psychic ground covered over the past two years, other types of movement seem trivial. In my children’s school, there has been more intake churn, and more evidence of people selling up and moving across the country, than anything seen prior to 2020.
Still, for many of us social conformity and conditioning run deep. “Am I being a brat?” said my friend. We’d been round this cul-de-sac before. Most people hate their jobs; having a job was a privilege; where did boldness stop and recklessness begin? At root, what made her think she deserved better? We talked about the endless books and podcasts that foreground the success of people who quit – like Jeff Bezos quitting finance to start Amazon – and how the thousands of people for whom this risk presumably didn’t pay off never get much of a look-in. We discussed whether there was some middle ground, where she might scale down to part time. Every one of these discussions ended in despair. We have one life. What is there to gamble on if it isn’t yourself?
I think you should take the moral high ground, I said: tell them you could string them along while you look for something else, but that it’s better all round if you quit. We did a few role plays, all of which ended in hysteria when one or other of us addressed the boss character as “madam”. We tried to anticipate what horrible things would be said to her in the course of resigning. “It’s abusive”, we said of her workplace, which is true. As a single contributor to the Great Resignation, my friend is part of a movement that at a distance looks seamless, even easy, but behind the scenes is riven with anxiety and self-doubt. Late yesterday, her boss cancelled the meeting at the last minute. My friend felt a combination of relief, disappointment and shame at not being able to execute her plan. She’ll do it next week.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist