I quit.

A lot of ruminations about quitting have come across my desk over the last few months. 

From When Quitting is the Boldest Move You Can Make:

Whatever shows up in your consciousness—that’s what wants to be known, understood, and tended to. Be it the desire to quit, fear of getting fired, or replaying an argument with your spouse—if the experience is alive within you, you can either handle it directly, or carry it around like heavy luggage. The more unaccepting or unconscious you are of what lives within you, the more it persists and leaks out in other ways.

Quitting isn’t inherently a problem. But letting it run silently in the background can be. It drains your energy and robs you of the joy of a day’s work well done.

From Quit Pleasing the Machine:

You can blame everything external for your imprisonment: the economy, the government, your parents, your circumstances. They’re all perfectly evident reasons. But the real prison is subtler than you’d like to believe. It’s the suitcase you carry everywhere — packed with stories about who you’re supposed to be, how to earn your place in the world, how to be acceptable, productive, and safe.

The suitcase is heavy because it contains every agreement you’ve made about what makes you valuable. Every story about what responsible adults do. Every script about how to earn love by becoming what others need you to be. You’ve been hauling this thing around so long you mistake its weight for your worth.

From Oliver Burkeman’s last column: the eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life:

When stumped by a life choice, choose “enlargement” over happiness. I’m indebted to the Jungian therapist James Hollis for the insight that major personal decisions should be made not by asking, “Will this make me happy?”, but “Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me?” We’re terrible at predicting what will make us happy: the question swiftly gets bogged down in our narrow preferences for security and control. But the enlargement question elicits a deeper, intuitive response. You tend to just know whether, say, leaving or remaining in a relationship or a job, though it might bring short-term comfort, would mean cheating yourself of growth. (Relatedly, don’t worry about burning bridges: irreversible decisions tend to be more satisfying, because now there’s only one direction to travel – forward into whatever choice you made.)

From Matt Haig, in The Life Impossible:

It seems to me that if you want truth, if you want to lead a full and aware life, you should head towards possibility, towards mystery and movement, towards travel or change, because when you find the universality within that, you find yourself. Your ever-moving self. You arrive in the act of leaving. Of staying open, always, to the possibility that the simple things we tell ourselves may all be wrong.

From Working Identity:

Transitions are iterative, experimental, wild, chaotic, opportunistic, joyful, and anxious periods, which, when observed in the midst of their unfolding, often seem like they are going nowhere; but that disorder has a point, in that it makes space for the trial and error necessary to learn where it is you want to go, and what it will mean for you when you get there.

From Pep Talk:

Our lives are all subject to change, no matter how solid they appear. You can lose—or choose to leave—your job or your relationship. I know that. But then she said something I’m still thinking about.

“Do you trust Maggie?”

Oof. Have you ever been having a conversation with someone—a therapist, a friend, a parent, a mentor—and they say something that makes you feel sucker punched in the best way? This was one of those moments. I’m responsible for my life; do I trust myself with it? 

Yes. I trust myself to show up consistently, to act with integrity in my relationships and in my work, and to keep my priorities straight. I don’t succeed at everything I try, but I’ve never quit on myself. I’ve got me.

I got good at quitting pretty early on in life: I quit university, I quit jobs, I quit provinces.

And then I forgot how. 

And I did the same thing, for a long, long time. 

I started working with The Old Farmers Almanac in 1996. It wasn’t quite the very beginning of the Internet, but it was pretty close, close enough that we were making stuff up as we did it. It was exciting. There were few rules. There was no revenue, and, at least at the beginning, no pressure to find any. I loved it. 

And I continued to love it: it was almost the ideal work situation for me, working with a quirky team of smart people, always remote, being able to visit them and share meals a few times a year. I owned the stack, didn’t need to rely on anyone.

The first time I consciously remember taking steps to consider doing something else was 12 years in, in 2008.

A position came available at Nokia in Helsinki:

Our Early Technology Validation team is part of the Technology Strategy and Architecture unit within Nokia’s Software & Services group. The mission of our new team is to develop, prototype and verify new software concepts aiming at later productization. 

I liked the sound of that, and I liked the idea of living in Helsinki.

I applied, had a couple of phone interviews, and then a face-to-face interview at a Nokia office in New England. My interest grew: I was attracted to the idea of making stuff up again, of there being fewer rules, of the emphasis being on prototyping rather than production. The people were interesting, smart. 

Alas, toward the end of the hiring process, they moved the position from Helsinki to Burlington, Massachusetts, and all of a sudden the position lost a lot of what had made it interesting.

I put my wandering dreams on the shelf for a while, never intending to set them aside forever. My work with the Almanac continued to be interesting, the team I was working with only got better, and I was well-compensated.

Six years later, my late partner Catherine was diagnosed with incurable cancer, and any sense that pursuing itchy feet was conceivable got cast right to the side: we needed stability, a regular income, and were in no position to entertain flights of fancy.

As much as I might want to claim that didn’t bother me, to take the altruistic high ground,  leaving aside the possibility of an escape hatch was hard, and required shutting down parts of me.

The stability and flexibility I had gave me the opportunity to be a good caregiver, to Catherine, and to Olivia through her teenage years. When Catherine died, in January 2020, I was afforded even more stability and flexibility, by extremely compassionate colleagues; I owe them so much for helping me make it through. 

It wasn’t until the spring of 2022 when those dormant wandering parts started to reignite. 

At Lisa’s suggestion, I listened to an interview with Diana Chapman, Trusting Your Instincts, where she talked about the difference between things that are good, and things that are exquisite:

Well, I love the word exquisite. And it’s something that I’m putting a lot of attention on is how could I have it be exquisite? And what I find for myself and others is I can make a lot of things good.

I’m, you know, give me some lemons, I’ll make you lemonade. It’s good. But I may never taste champagne if I’m just tolerating good.

And so I’m really learning how to be discerning to say, but what if you could have exquisite? I’m learning to say no to a lot of things. And it’s very heartbreaking, honestly, because those things are good.

And they’re wonderful. And it doesn’t mean I let go of all of them. But I’ve been letting go of a lot lately.

I got me thinking, and it gave me a framework of thinking about my work: it didn’t have to be horrible, it didn’t have to be something I needed a desperate escape from. It could be good. But what if I wanted exquisite?

To explore this, I had a series of what I came to call “curious conversations,” some with people I’ve known for a long time, some with people I only just met.

Here’s how I put the idea forward to prospects:

At the dawn of the project it was true “making up the Internet as it was forming in front of us,” but in the years since I’ve settled into the role of an “operations man,” and while I could quite sustainably and somewhat-happily continue this work forever, circumstances in my life have prompted me to take a hard look at whether there might be other things I might do.

To this end, I’m setting aside time this month to take a step back and look at my working life and where I want to head.

I need help reflecting on how to use my peculiar set of skills and sensibilities to make the most helpful impact on the world, and on myself; I would value your thoughts, and appreciate pointers to others I might talk to along the way. 

The conversations were universally helpful: I learned a lot about other people’s working lives, about things they had stayed with, and things they had quit. I learned about how they pursued their dreams, about the regrets they carried for not.

It took me a whole other year to decide that I was ready to quit, and then another eight months to work myself out of my role. My colleagues at the Almanac were enormously gracious in accepting my resignation, and in creating a smooth runway.

In the summer of 2023, Lisa accompanied me to the Almanac campus in New Hampshire for the annual company meeting, my final one. 

I was given a very nice send-off:

And, as a final act, I stood in front of the Almanac Webcam and had it take one final snapshot of me waving goodbye:

From my initial stirring that I might want to look for something else, until my last day at the keyboard, took me 15 years. 

I don’t regret those 15 years: I remember them as being filled with laughter, puzzles to solve, disasters to recover from, friendship.

But they were also filled with a background of wondering whether there might be something else. As I quoted above, “[t]he more unaccepting or unconscious you are of what lives within you, the more it persists and leaks out in other ways.” Those leaks took their toll. 

So I do wonder what different turns my life may have taken have I sought exquisite over good earlier, had I, as Matt Haig wrote headed “towards possibility, towards mystery and movement, towards travel or change.”

It’s been 18 months since I shut the door to the server room, and put down tools.

What have I been doing? Has it been exquisite?

Sometimes, definitely, yes. 

But it’s also been a lot of decompression, finding my feet, becoming comfortable with being idle. 

More often than I would like, I’ve thrown myself into work-like technical tasks because I’ve felt the need for the thrill of the hunt, the escape from every day. Without puzzles to solve, who am I?

Being forced to be sedentary for the last six weeks has given me a lot of time for a reflection. I’ve been forced to become comfortable with being idle. My usual distractions have not been available to me. 

It has been uncomfortable. 

But discomfort is, I am convinced, the doorway through which I need to walk toward exquisite.