About two months ago, I quit my job. About a month ago, I deployed a Polygon NFT called QuitterDAO collection.
I went through the psychological process that everyone who quit their job without another job lining up would have gone through. Based on the “principle” that nothing new is under the sun. I figure that a lot of quitters probably will feel the same way as I do. And that’s why I want to write about my journey as a quitter. To make the stories of quitters more heard and seen.
Not being able to generate cash flow is scary. The money I saved over the years is decreasing faster than expected. I start to feel like a whit. Then I learned a word called alienation. It happens when we attach our sense of self-worth to our labor income. It’s not even tied to the actual value or impact I made on society. People can do the bullshit jobs and make the world worse but still be “valuable”.
I started to do some tangible labor to feel self-worth again. I started to cook almost every meal. I start to do some handmade crafts. I started to do a bunch of fermented food (food starts to taste really good after just some days or even just hours of fermentation/marination). Enjoying and consuming the things I produced is very satisfying. I start to code a lot of side projects where I build everything from scratch. I am able to see the actual impact I had on my passion project and it has made me super, super happy.. Coding has never been so fun before.
Then some days will hit really hard. For me, it comes when receiving rejection letters from companies I have applied to. It happens after I did a bunch of Leetcode (after swearing that I won’t waste my time on those useless things) but still failed the technical interviews. I feel dumb again. I start to question my skill as a programmer even though I have coded something I’m proud of and socially recognized for.
I still didn’t regret my decision. It’s just one of the hard and right things I need to do. It didn’t happen overnight, the idea has been haunting me for more than half a year. I’m lucky enough to have friends that are not software engineers, so I'm able to see that there are so many different ways of living a life; that it’s okay to not figure everything out in my life and still live a healthy and hopeful life; that having a six-figure job right after graduation is rather a privilege that most other majors don’t have; that I still have a home to fall back to and take a rest from the “adult life” for a couple of months.
I was always joking about how lazy I am. And I am lazy because I have the obligation to balance out the workaholic people in the world. There are so many fake lazy people who always say things like meditation, mindfulness, or slowing down. But slowing down for the sake of becoming more efficient later at work is not really slowing down. Meditation and mindfulness have become lucrative businesses. Rich tech gurus doing luxury retreat has become a self-deceptive "get in touch with self and nature".
We have been told to celebrate the hardworking, to award the extraordinary, we even invent concepts like willpower or grit so that we could prophetically know if a child is going to be successful or not right after they turned 3.
I was playing with dirt and sand throughout my elementary school when prodigies probably have just finished programming their first game. I know no shit about myself or what I am capable of or what I am passionate about even when I was in my senior year of college. But society is always pushing people to be faster, higher, and stronger. It is almost as if we can't start early we lose our life to others.
Life is much more non-linear than that.
I heard a very good sentence from a podcast. You must not feel that your life is important to live a nomad life. I think it’s also true for people who decide to move out of the city and take the time to really enjoy life and nature and communicate with people to foster a deep connection.
If we put a high priority on achieving goals, we will inevitably put a low priority on cultivating nurturing relationships with our friends, lover, work, or even our physical home. But so many studies show that the quality of life is much more dependent on the quality of our relationship with other people than on the amazing work we have done.
Circling back to what finally triggered my decision to quit my job -- it’s from a passage in NVC (non-violent communication) where Rosenberg suddenly realizes that he doesn’t have to write the report every day that he hated so much. He always had the choice to not write the report by quitting the job.
He stated that we usually have the following needs when we think we have to do something: (1) For Money (2) For Approval (3) To Escape Punishment (4) To Avoid Shame (5) To Avoid Guilt (6) To Satisfy a Sense of Duty. And he ended the chapter with the highlight “The most dangerous of all behaviors may consist of doing things “because we’re supposed to”."
I always had the choice to quit my job. The thing that concerns me the most is the money. I don’t usually care about the other 5 factors. So after I calculated my savings and reassured myself that I won’t be homeless immediately if I quit my job, I finally made the decision. What makes me want to quit my job is rather self-explanatory. Just ask anyone who is unhappy about their corporate job and why they’re not unhappy about it. It’s usually because of a list of similar reasons.
When I first started the QuitterDAO collection, I was trying to make it just like all other 99% NFT collections: sell the NFT, do a road map, do an NFT-gated discord group chat, and just make people shit posting with each other.
Now I have a better idea about how I want the QuitterDAO to be. Still a group chat, but not NFT-gated, (you can buy me a coffee by buying an NFT for 5.13 Matic) with different channels where people can share their life after quitting, all the positives and negatives. Maybe we could do some circling once in a while, or people-matching, daily ask and take, daily expressing-your-need exercises, or maybe people who are living low-cost nomadic life can share their tips, etc.
The point is to make people who have the courage to quit their job be seen and heard. One of the best TED talks I have ever seen is Barbara Sher’s Isolation is the dream killer, not your attitude. We can be depressed AF, but as long as we don’t forget to connect, the number of solutions is always greater than the number of problems. And from past experience, merely the act of expressing one’s need and having it heard clearly from other people would already be very powerful.