The Great Work Rethink
Care and The Great Resignation, planning for long lives, challenging the status quo of motherhood, and more.
A few years before the Great Resignation, we both left our jobs.
For Eva, it happened in 2015. She loved her job and boss and colleagues, but nearing 40, with twins nearing 5, she wanted more time to spend with her family, and more time for herself. So she set up shop as a freelance writer and editor, working with a small set of clients till mid-afternoon, when she snapped her laptop shut and walked down the block to pick up her kids from school. Every afternoon they had adventures, building bush forts in Oakland’s Redwood forest or taking their dog, Daisy, to splash in the Bay. Today they live in Australia, but Eva still stops work when her kids’ school day ends. As she puts it, “I’m ambitious till 3 o’clock.”
For Christine, it happened in 2017. She came home from work one day to her husband and preschooler twins reading on the couch, as they often were when she got home—but they were reading to him. She hadn’t realized how much she was missing—and quit her job shortly thereafter.
Coincidentally, we both left work when our respective sets of twins were 4. It’s a precious age, with new discoveries, impossible questions, and changes every day. Working full-time jobs, we missed out on many of those changes, unless they happened in the morning before we rushed out the door to work (unlikely in Christine’s case, since she left before they woke up), or in the evening, in the short span of time between when work ends and little ones snuggle into bed.
We both loved our jobs, but we quit full-time employment because work wasn’t working for our lives, something many people have discovered during the pandemic.
Since January, more than 35 million Americans have quit work during what’s now called the Great Resignation. Before that, tens of millions of women, many mothers, were forced out of work, unable to manage the demands of work, care, and remote school when offices and schools shut down.
These transformations in the workforce reflect a widespread desire to rethink work. For generations, we have accepted a culture of work that prioritizes sacrifice, productivity, and self-gain. But these values are not serving our lives. Now many people are starting to define and demand what they need and want from work to support their lives.
It’s the time to do so: As labor economist Betsey Stevenson told The New York Times, it’s like the whole country is in the grips of a union renegotiation, and “it seems like workers have the upper hand.”
One of the primary reasons we left full-time employment was to create time and space for care, a lens we believe could help us all rethink our relationship with work, as individuals and society.
We explored care—and what we could gain if we prioritize care in work, our lives, and beyond—in our latest Life I Want stories:
Care and the Great Work Rethink: The Great Mom Walk-Out and the Great Resignation are causing people to rethink work—to define and demand what they need and want from work to support their lives. What would happen if we prioritized care?
How to Plan for Longer Lives: As our lives are projected to last longer than in the past, how should we rethink what we want our lives to look like?
How Katherine Goldstein is Using Movement Journalism to Create Change for Mothers: The Double Shift is challenging the status quo of motherhood and journalism.
We’d love to hear from you: Has the Great Resignation touched a nerve when it comes to your own relationship with work? If you could wave a magic wand and create new values around work, what would they be?
We hope you’re staying safe and having a good start to the holiday season. If you have some downtime, here are some recent great reads and listens:
Reimagining Work: For the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Tapestry show, we spoke with host Mary Hynes about rethinking work to prioritize what matters most in life.
This is How to Quit Without Harboring Regrets: For Fast Company, Christine wrote about how she worked to leave her job at Amazon with gratitude and closure.
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals: Oliver Burkeman’s new book challenges the “depressingly narrow-minded” way we think about time. It’s not about time management, he writes, but the “outrageous brevity and shimmering possibilities of our four thousand weeks.”
The Book of Form and Emptiness: Ruth Ozeki’s new novel will make you look differently at everyday objects, and rethink what it means to listen and love.
If you’re a new subscriber, welcome! You can learn more about The Life I Want storytelling project and read all of our blog posts at www.thelifeiwant.co. We love hearing from our readers, so please don’t hesitate to get in touch via email (hello@thelifeiwant.co), or LinkedIn or Twitter (@EvaDienel and @christinebader).
We’ve held a few community Zoom calls and plan to continue those in the New Year, so let us know if there are topics you want to discuss with others seeking a better future of work, and stay tuned for the next ones.
Warmly,
Eva & Christine