Robert Wringham has the essential guide for anyone who wants to break free
They’re calling it the Great Resignation. People are quitting their jobs in droves, escaping the daily grind in search of meaning. If you want to quit your job, and create a new life of freedom, then read on.
It happened like this… A few months into the pandemic, many people found themselves furloughed or working from home and – faced with the prospects of social collapse and death – took serious stock of what matters in life.
Others found themselves treated badly in frontline care or retail work when their firms failed to provide adequate safety measures, or made cuts, blaming the pandemic. And some workers found themselves with savings for the first time, after no longer being able to go anywhere or do anything. This potent mix of saved money and existential contemplation has led to people realising they can do something with their lives other than work.
While it’s hard to find figures on how many people are involved in the Great Resignation – and how many are embracing the idler’s life rather than seeking more work – it’s likely to be millions. A worldwide survey of 30,000 people conducted by Microsoft suggests that 41 per cent of us are thinking of leaving our jobs.
The recent supply-line crisis also suggests a change in attitude to work. Isn’t it interesting that while there’s a desperate shortage of HGV drivers, care workers and shop assistants, UK unemployment is still quite high at 4.6 percent? Despite a century of being told authoritatively there’s no alternative to the jobs system and that idling is evil, a significant number of people have finally said no to toil.
Moreover, a recent Survation poll suggests that half of the British public wants to abolish the five-day, nine-to-five week and replace it with a pattern of fewer and shorter working days.
This all amounts to a sweet moral victory for idlers. An unemployed population is normally useful to The Man as a reserve army of willing wage slaves. While simultaneously maligned as scroungers as part of a moral crusade against taking it easy, the reserve bank of unemployed essentially allows bosses to say to their workers, “If you don’t like your job or the peanuts we pay you, you can piss off and we’ll replace you.”
Not any more, it seems. To win back the “workforce”, i.e. people, they’ve treated so badly, companies are already offering “golden hellos” (cash bonuses for accepting work once seen as menial), and Chancellor Sunak spoke recently about moving swiftly to a high-wage economy to tempt workers back. Naturally, he’s framing it as good for the British people and one in the eye for the EU rather than, as the case may be, the workers having the capitalists over a barrel.
The pandemic showed, as if more evidence were needed, that bosses don’t care much about workers, and that workers can escape if they’re clever and organised. The Great Resigners didn’t need a revolution to go. They just needed some time to think, to reassess, and to save up a useful sum of money.
I’ve been avoiding the oppressive world of work for almost two decades, so I know what I’m talking about.
Here’s my guide to quitting your job.
Know that the door was never locked
First, understand that you can walk out whenever you like. You can quit right now, live off your savings or go on the dole. Unless you happen to be a highly valuable employee of a litigious or petty corporation, you don’t even need to give notice. Leaving on a whim is a breach of contract, but that doesn’t have much legal standing in the real world and they won’t come after you. What’s more, your manager will likely have breached the contracts of workers many times, or else pointed in bad faith to contractual vagueries like “perform other duties as and when required”.
If you want to push back from your desk and leave without even saying goodbye, just do it. Kristen, a public-sector office worker I know, quit her job by email, left her company laptop at reception and never came back. She told them she’d found another job (she hadn’t) and “wanted a clean break”. She played stupid, acting like she’d never heard of contracts, and that was that. But wait! There are safer ways to quit. After all, you might need to go back, which would be difficult if you’d insulted everyone first.
A preliminary question
Before you quit, ask yourself if you’re certain you want to go. Things have changed in the world of work recently. If you can work from home, you can theoretically work from anywhere, which is a kind of freedom, albeit a tainted one. An employed life beneath fluorescent lights was once intolerable, but being able to take naps on your sofa and no longer having to commute is quite an improvement. Then again, the surveillance technology they’ve put on your laptop and the expectation to Zoom with colleagues at short notice might be reason enough to go.
Start saving your cash
If you want to escape responsibly you’ll need to build an escape fund. That’s what many of the Great Resigners I’ve spoken to have done, and what I did when I quit my job to be a full-time writer. I usually suggest people aim for something like £10,000-£15,000, which may sound like a lot, but even on a wage of, say, £21,000 per year, it should be possible if you’re frugal. Every time you decide not to go to the cinema, you’re adding £15 to your escape fund. Every time you read a library book instead of doing something more expensive for an hour, you’re banking maybe a tenner. Be a minimalist. Become resourceful. Enjoy free things. To get started, write down your monthly outgoings (or input them into one of those spreadsheets your boss forces you to use): TV licence (£13.25), electricity (£40), rent (£600), etc. Then cull them – make savings wherever you can. You can then calculate how much money you’ll need in order to take a year off work.
Wait – a year off? Yes, a year is the aim at this point. The idea is to quit as soon as possible and do something more interesting, more fun, more rewarding, for one year. How you fill that year is up to you. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Use your current job as a career gym
Before you leave, use your remaining time at work in ways that increase your skill set for the future. Learn as much as you can from colleagues, clients, the cleaner. Bank money but also bank ideas, skills and connections.
Decide what you’re escaping to (or don’t)
Ask yourself what your ideal life would look like without your anti-idling job. Is your idea of the good life a tropical island? The countryside? Your current city or a different one? Do you want to spend more time with loved ones, or travel? In my books about escape, I recommend conducting a “life audit”. This is an exercise in finding your priorities. Build a list of five areas of life that are meaningful to you and arrange them in order of importance. Take your time and be thorough. You don’t need to work out how to act on them yet – it’s simply about establishing a direction for your journey.
Give your notice and go
It’s probably best to be classy when you quit. I’d recommend giving notice in-person. If that feels scary, you could do it by email but you’ll have to talk to your boss sooner or later, so why not be there to watch their smile collapse when you give them the news? I’d also advise that you work your notice, taking any outstanding annual leave as cash towards your escape fund. On the other hand, if you really want to make a statement, you could deliver the news as one disgruntled office worker in America did – via a barbershop quartet.
Don’t worry, be happy
Now that you’ve quit, enjoy your time off. Don’t spend it in a state of anxiety and don’t leap into deciding what comes next. Indulge in idle pursuits (read The Book of Idle Pleasures if you’re short of ideas) and luxuriate in rising at 10am instead of six. What happens next in terms of a new job or project will come to you. When you’ve found the space to relax, an idea will drift into your mind while you’re reading a library book or having a walk, and you’ll be excited to get on with it. Trust this approach. It works. And if you need guidance, go back to your life audit. Ask yourself if you still identify with those ideas, and if not, what’s changed?
Move on to your next thing
Your period of self-financed freedom will draw to a close either because you’re ready to return to work or running out of money. But you will have arrived at a handful of ideas about what to do next. It doesn’t matter if they don’t look immediately practical or lucrative. Now’s the time to draw up mini feasibility studies on how to get started with them. If this sounds difficult, remind yourself how hard you used to work for someone else. And remember, even if you have to return to work, at least you’ll have enjoyed a period of freedom: an advance on your retirement while you’re still young. You’ll also have collected some stories about freedom and failure to tell at the water cooler. It’s amazing that this scenario – the mild embarrassment of returning as a failed adventurer – might scare people, but really it’s hilarious and fun.
Be a part of it
Funeral arranger Vivienne enjoyed four months of liberty before accepting a part-time job with a funeral director closer to her house. Former bookseller Ralph continues to work for himself as a graphic designer. How about you? Why not be a part of the Great Resignation? If nothing else, you’ll be adding to the unemployment or resignation statistics, which will communicate an important message to The Man: “Shove it!”
For all you know, the Great Resignation might be remembered as your generation’s Woodstock. When asked, “Where were you in the Great Resignation, Mum?” don’t let your answer be, “Well, I ignored my dreams, knuckled down and worked through it all in the hope that you could have a better life, even though you’ll probably just repeat the cycle for your own stupid kids.”
It would be much better to say, “I told my boss to get stuffed. And then I met your dad. We were buying ice cream!”
Robert Wringham quit his job to be a writer and comedian. His latest book, Stern Plastic Owl, is available from gofasterstripe.com. His books about work and how to avoid it are called Escape Everything! and The Good Life for Wage Slaves. wringham.co.uk. This is an edited version of a longer piece which appears in Idler #82, Jan/Feb 2022.
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