We are nearly there folks. The end is nigh and the beginning near. I can just about sniff 2024. How’s yours smelling? Fresh or slightly stale?
You may not have started mulling that over yet, but I think it’s good to get it out of the way while the Christmas lights twinkle rather than droop.
I was prompted to think about how we handle switching stuff up and making major life changes after an on air conversation with a popular YouTuber and podcaster this week.
Hannah Witton, the online sex educator, has made the decision to stop making the content she’s become known for after what sounded like lots of soul-searching. As she put it on her newsletter: “I feel like I’ve said everything that I want to or can say about sex and relationships at this point and I’m ready for a change. These projects feel finished and complete to me. It’s finally time to refill the well.”
Her friend’s response? To throw her a quitting party. And it sounded like just what she needed – transforming a decision she had laboured and worried over into something to celebrate. Divorce parties have become a thing for some, so why not extend that trend to breaking up with jobs?
Resigning has such a tired and sad air about it. But quitting? That sounds vibrant and fizzy – more in line with the type of world some of us inhabit where our jobs can be an extension of ourselves, or certainly a weird augmentation of us.
I know quitting jobs can come about in terrible and toxic circumstances, but the idea of owning it with a celebration – as you perhaps take stock of the year that was – is something I could get on board with. Cards telling you not to return, cakes providing the sugar rush and some form of banging music ought to suffice. Life is short, no choice has to be for ever and it’s good to keep shaking things up.
Quitting celebrations follows neatly on from the wave of resignation parties in China this year. Younger people there are leaving jobs once seen as enviable and providing stability because they feel burnt out and poorly paid.
They throw parties that look more like birthday celebrations, with banners, balloons and tables stuffed with food, to celebrate their new freedom from jobs they found to be deadening them.
It’s also worth recalling America’s Great Resignation movement, where people looked at their lives anew as offices reopened and decided they wanted to work differently. Quitting abounded: nearly 50 million people left their jobs in 2022.
There has been a great deal of change in our relationships with our jobs. Lockdown shifted the dial for many – most obviously with where work takes place. But it has also led to people choosing jobs based on the amount of flex in the system and how it balances with the rest of their life or other jobs.
Not all of these changes are necessarily positive. Some are particularly concerned that the rise of home working will lead to greater levels of loneliness. Others think it could be particularly bad for women and younger people because they are out of sight and out of mind for career progression.
The renegotiations continue, mainly with ourselves, as we grapple with what we can afford to shift and alter. It can be agonising and paralysing.
While even entertaining such choice must be recognised for the luxury it really is, I do love what Ellen Langer, the legendary Harvard professor of psychology, has to say about decision-making (she should know, having taught her course on the very subject for more than 40 years): “Rather than worry about whether the decision was right, try to make it work. In other words, don’t try to make the right decision, make the decision right.”
She advises people to stop making lists of pros and cons about decisions, reminding us that we cannot predict the future, and more information doesn’t necessarily mean better decision-making. Quite.
Sometimes you just know. I remember that feeling when I decided to leave Newsnight last year after three hugely enjoyable years of presenting the programme. I was done and I suddenly knew it. I had learnt a great deal, felt I had achieved all I could there at that time and was ready to dedicate attention to other projects. But people can be very suspicious when you simply to decide to quit. It can still be seen as shocking and quite transgressive.
Ultimately, it’s no one else’s life but yours – which is worth remembering, because it always amazes me how dramatic job changes feel in your own head. But they are, hands down, one of the only bits of personal news you can tell close friends and family that they care very little about. Despite how high stakes it feels inside your mind, these moves rarely elicit the sort of responses other news does, such as a house move, a new baby or an engagement. If anything, it’s usually pretty anti-climatic.
You are only in a race with yourself, and that’s why you must be fully on board with any such change. Yes, bigger disruptions that emanate from a switch and will affect your partner and family need to be discussed in the round and agreed. But it’s only you waking up each morning to do the said job. Even your partner cares less than you think. I would go as far to say that talking about jobs and job changes is down there with telling them about the dream you had last night. In painstaking detail. They don’t really give a fig.
The footballer Alessia Russo gave an interview this week to The Guardian about her move from Manchester United, a team she adored and was very at home in, to Arsenal. She said: “I felt so comfortable. I’ve got some of my best friends in Manchester. I know I’ve still got them as friends for life, which is great. But people go through it all the time: you have to step out of your comfort zone. That’s what I had to do to make the next step.”
It doesn’t even sound like she was on board with it. But she knew she had to do it. Sometimes that’s all it really is. Make the decisions you make the right ones – as Langer compellingly argues. And the weirdest thing of all? It won’t be that dramatic after all.