Change
I have some trouble starting this article. It’s supposed to about quitting my cushy job in the world of finance + technology, or “fintech” as it’s more commonly known, and going off to do something more purposeful, or at least different, with my time.
I feed this prompt into ChatGPT to see what it might spit out.
help me start an article about quitting my tech jobChatGPT replies.
Starting an article about quitting your tech job can be a compelling and personal journey. You want to draw the reader in by establishing the context of why you left, sharing relatable moments, and providing insights that resonate with others considering a similar move. Here’s a possible structure and introduction to help you get started:
Title: "Why I Quit My Tech Job: A Journey from Burnout to Balance"
In the heart of the fast-paced, ever-evolving tech world, I found myself living the dream—or at least, that's what I thought. Working at a top-tier company, surrounded by innovation, I was living a life many aspire to: competitive salary, exciting projects, and endless growth opportunities. But behind the gloss of success, something was missing. The relentless grind, the long hours, and the constant pressure to stay ahead began to wear me down. What started as passion slowly morphed into burnout.
This is my story of stepping away from a career that many would consider the pinnacle of success and what I learned about work, life, and myself along the way.My eyes glaze over as I read this. I feel like I shouldn’t be complaining, because this technology is practically magic, albeit a very expensive kind, but it did start with all the cliches: burnout, balance, grid, passion. Boring, just so boring. And so predictable. “Anodyne” is the word I hear a lot from Kara Swisher on her podcast. I think it applies here, too.
an·o·dyne
/ˈanəˌdīn/
adjective
not likely to provoke dissent or offense; inoffensive, often deliberately so.
"anodyne New Age music"I’m sure if I keep going with GPT or Claude or Gemini or any other toy out there, it could eventually get me to something more interesting, but I have no desire to do that at this point (and hopefully never in the future). How then to write something meaningful, that comes across as genuine and will resonate with people? I’ll start where things started making less and less sense to me, personally.
The Pandemic
I had a whole decade of experience in becoming disillusioned with life before 2020; my entire life before it, really, and the financial world in America is particularly disheartening. But the pandemic crystallized things in a way not much else had before it. Which is why I chose it as the starting point. Because things were so obviously wrong, and not in a subtle fashion. And we all experienced it together.
While the WHO has declared that we are done with the emergency aspect of it, the pandemic itself is not considered technically “over”. At some point SARS-CoV-2 will become endemic, of course; maybe it’s already that. I’m not going to recap all the things that went on in the wider world at the time, and I consider myself privileged to have been able to get through it in relative comfort, even if a New York City apartment is not the ideal setting to live through something of that magnitude.
My spouse and I were able to work remotely, get groceries delivered on time, get takeout when we wanted, stream shows and movies to our hearts’ content, clapped and cheered for front line workers at 7 pm like the good citizens that we were. We even managed to escape to Long Island for a few weeks. We were able to follow the chaos of those times online and from a distance. Well, somewhat at a distance: we live not far from Elmhurst hospital, which had ambulances rushing towards it at all times of the day during the initial critical weeks. We could hear the wailing of the siren every few minutes; it was particularly spooky at night.
At that time, I kept track of our experiences and the online discourse by making drawings of it on a whiteboard. Most of it was morbidly humorous. Also humorous: covering myself from head to toe while going grocery shopping for fear of catching the virus through surfaces, while leaving my face exposed and maskless because the CDC had asked us to save them for healthcare workers while reviewing guidance. Then spending an hour cleaning and disinfecting everything I had bought because that one doctor on YouTube had told us to wash our fruits and veggies with soapy water.
To me, the pandemic exposed the distorted nature of our society to a greater degree than almost anything else that came before; the recession had happened over a decade ago, and while there were some slight effects on my career (recapped a little bit here), it didn’t seem that big a deal at the time. The pandemic, however: inequality, injustice, paranoia, conspiracies. The blatant disregard for others’ lives by people in power, and by those asked to do some simple things out of consideration for their fellow humans who were more vulnerable to the virus. All of it was on full display, and we, being the voracious consumers that we are, consumed it all.
Being privileged - yes, it’s an annoying and overused word now, but that’s what it was - I could consume it from the safety of my home. I had already gotten sucked into Twitter during the Trump presidency; with the pandemic, I also added a few subreddits to my daily rotation of social media follows, as I stayed up late reading about the conspiracies, and the misfortunes of others. I still effortlessly remember some of the bogus remedies: Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, colloidal silver. It was easy to laugh at the people being fooled into trying out some of these “cures”.
One subreddit in particular that I frequented was named after the hapless Herman Caine, who famously died because of covid after publicly proclaiming his anti-mask and anti-social distancing stance only to catch the disease at a Trump rally. The schadenfreude was sweet to behold, but it should have been a warning. A cousin with whom I was longer in contact lost their battle with covid not long before the vaccine was available. Reflecting back on our childhood when we spent spent some time together, this cousin seemed to have had some undiagnosed developmental issues, and all I could feel was pity for what seemed to me a broken life that ended harshly. Since then, pity is what I’ve been feeling for most people, even those that are seemingly of “sound” mind. Because I feel like they’re holding back a lot of mental anguish.
It does not feel like we - or maybe just me? but talking to friends and family has only reinforced that opinion - processed the experience of the pandemic very well. The vaccine being made available at a miraculous pace meant that we barely had time to digest the events of the past year and it was full speed ahead with trying to get life back to “normal”. Soon we were back in the office, at varying levels of attendance, with some concessions from employers and some discussion about how the lessons from the pandemic could be used to make the workplace better for everyone (read white-collar workers) going forward.
The spring of 2021, when the vaccine was starting to become widely available, seemed to hold so much promise. By the end of the year, the gloom descended again. Sure, the vaccine would probably prevent the most serious harms, but it could only do so much. My spouse caught covid in the wave going around that winter; I got it the following summer. But it wasn’t the pandemic alone that has changed my thinking about the meaning of work and living.
Making a Change
I’m planning to write a few articles about this potential-fool’s-errand to find something more meaningful to do with my time and how I got to that point. Of course, this might seem more than a bit navel-gazey, but maybe someone will get some new information out of this and begin to think differently too; after all I went through this process, as did countless others before me. I recently listened to this episode of Death, Sex & Money (Spotify link below) between the host Anna Sail and the guest PJ Vogt who has his own podcast Search Engine (highly recommend), where in this one part they are talking about people attempting to change their habits especially around New Year’s. The conversation goes like this:
PJ: I find the changing of seasons really beautiful in that I think people change so infrequently, but they do change, and sometimes they change on purpose.
And to go into an attempt to change, you both need to know it’s very rare, and you’re probably gonna look silly.
…
But we were trying to put the listener in a place where you could be like, yeah, January at the gym is a foolish place, but we should applaud people for trying.
And we should also understand that some people do break through, and some people, the orbits we become stuck on, sometimes people manage to break those orbits or wobble out of them.
I think one of the questions I find most interesting as a human, not always as a reporter, but as a human, is why does anybody finally change?
…
It’s also, how do the people who make changes like that in their life, how are they able to do it? Because oftentimes what happens is that you make that change.
And it’s like the person who was unable to make the change has almost been immolated, and they’re not there to answer questions anymore.
Like, you have a friend who becomes sober, and they’re like, yeah, I was a wreck.
And you’re like, but I want to talk to the wreck about how they became you.
I don’t want to talk to you about the wreck.
Like, I identify with the wreck.
Anna: Oh, that’s another thing you say in this episode that I really love.
You say, like, it’s much more interesting to listen to somebody figuring something out, rather than somebody who’s already figured something out.
This is why the conversation stuck with me:
I am making a change to my life.
Making that change might make me look silly for a few reasons to those looking in. I myself might feel the same at different points in this process.
Why leave a good job with a good salary? In this economy?
Why not just work within the system to try to make a change?
Can one retain professional or social standing if moving away from the mainstream?
Is it a good idea to lay out one’s innermost thoughts for people to pick at?
I want to talk about the change by writing about it, maybe not as it is happening, but hopefully not so long after that I’ve become a completely different person, that my past self has not "almost been immolated” as PJ says. I’m not out of the metaphorical wreckage, but trying to find a way out.
Hopefully, this lays the context for what I’m trying to get at. In the next article, I’m planning to write about my perspective on the different crises that are confronting us (that we are not necessarily confronting back, or doing so insufficiently, in my opinion).
Link to part 2: