The Dude’s relaxed attitude towards the pressures of life helped me realise it was better to be jobless than stuck in one I hated
Q
uitting your job in your 30s with no solid plan is generally considered poor decision-making. Doing it because you watched The Big Lebowski is probably even worse. But as I faced up to what would be my eighth year in an IT role, I watched Jeff Bridges meandering his way through the chaos of life in a dressing gown. And I found myself thinking: maybe the Dude had it figured out.
For most of my working life, my identity has been strongly bolstered by work: doing well career-wise felt like evidence of my utility and respectability (despite the fact no one ever really understood what my job was anyway). And, like most millennials, I’d felt exceptionally lucky to eventually get a grad job out of university at all, especially one that paid more than a “living wage”. On top of that, as a second generation immigrant, I’d been repeatedly told from a young age that being jobless is a terrible state of affairs.
I had been unhappy for some time, but leaving without a new role to go to had always seemed totally unthinkable. But life has a funny way of telling you when you’re no longer where you should be; against my will, I was moved to another department, with a nightmare boss. I then got another role where the colleagues were lovely, but the job felt deeply uncreative and uninteresting. Shortly after, senior leadership began talking about job cuts – it was clear we were expected to do just as much with even less.
