‘I yearned for a deeper, slower, more useful existence’: dispatches from the Great Resignation

Not long after I had left my job, and my marriage, and my home, in quick succession, I ran into an old acquaintance outside a local coffee shop. She had heard, of course, about the dismantling of my life, and now she looked at me, bewildered. “You had it all,” she said, as she gripped her cup. “And now you have … nothing?”

For many years I had tried to live a life that made sense to others. I had swanned from a prestigious university straight into a job at a prestigious newspaper. I had got married young, to the man I began dating at 23, we had bought a beautiful home, got ourselves a cat, and begun to talk about starting a family. I had tried, very hard, all my life, not to put a foot wrong. And yet something inside me felt perpetually crushed.

With hindsight, the confusion my old acquaintance experienced outside the coffee shop seems understandable. To reject, so resoundingly, all the signifiers of happiness and success can be unsettling to observers. But still, my decision to walk away from the life I had built remains something of which I am proud. It was turbulent, and it was terrible, and I regret the hurt that was caused, but it was also the making of me.

In recent years, books written by authors who chose to do something similar – taking a sharp left in their lives, where most might turn right – have become something of a genre. Loosely, these memoirs tend