Why quitting is wildly underrated

And here's why you should do it more

In the hustle-porn culture that most of us are immersed, quitting can seem like a dirty word. We either can’t quit (because of the cost of living crisis has us clinging on to even crappy jobs by our fingernails) or won’t quit, because in modern capitalism that deifies the ‘grind’, quitting is a loser’s game.

The ideology that we can be anything we want, achieve anything we want, as long as we want it enough, as long as we work hard enough has us scurrying like hamsters on a wheel, never pausing long enough to consider why we might want something. Quitting is not something we tend to advertise. But there is an extraordinary beauty in quitting; in saying no, this isn’t for me, and walking away.

Hi, my name is Priya, and I’m a serial quitter.

I quit one of the first jobs I ever had - a job as an editor at The Lancet medical journal, and one that many medical editors would kill for, because I wanted to write journalism rather than edit medical articles. I hadn’t been there long, and I’m pretty sure my colleagues were surprised, but I knew I needed to explore journalism in the field to see if I liked it. Then I moved to a news organisation, where I left after a couple of years because I developed chronic fatigue syndrome. Once recovered, I became an editor at New Scientist but left after a year to relocate with my ex-husband to New York when he got a job opportunity out there.

These were all hard-won roles that I had fought off huge competition to get, but at one point they didn’t feel like they fit what I needed in the moment, and so off I went. The last staff job I had was at the World Health Organization. Staff jobs are so well paid with such great benefits, that people told me I was mad to quit. But I truly never felt more sane.