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Reading For Friday April 23
Reading For Friday April 23
Burned out and flush with savings, some workers are quitting stable jobs in
search of postpandemic adventure.
By Kevin Roose
April 21, 2021Updated 7:29 a.m. ET
Some are abandoning cushy and stable jobs to start a new business, turn a side
hustle into a full-time gig or finally work on that screenplay. Others are scoffing
at their bosses’ return-to-office mandates and threatening to quit unless they’re
allowed to work wherever and whenever they want.
They are emboldened by rising vaccination rates and a recovering job market.
Their bank accounts, fattened by a year of stay-at-home savings and soaring
asset prices, have increased their risk appetites. And while some of them are just
changing jobs, others are stepping off the career treadmill altogether.
If this movement has a rallying cry, it’s “YOLO” — “you only live once,” an
acronym popularized by the rapper Drake a decade ago and deployed by
cheerful risk-takers ever since. The term is a meme among stock traders on
Reddit, who use it when making irresponsible bets that sometimes pay off
anyway. (This year’s GameStop trade was the archetypal YOLO.) More broadly,
it has come to characterize the attitude that has captured a certain type of bored
office worker in recent months.
completo.
meses.)
To be clear: The pandemic is not over, and millions of Americans are still
grieving the loss of jobs and loved ones. Not everyone can afford to throw
caution to the wind. But for a growing number of people with financial cushions
and in-demand skills, the dread and anxiety of the past year are giving way to a
new kind of professional fearlessness.
I started hearing these stories this year when several acquaintances announced
that they were quitting prestigious and high-paying jobs to pursue risky passion
projects. Since then, a trickle of LinkedIn updates has turned into a torrent.
I tweeted about it, and dozens of stories poured into my inboxes, all variations
on the same basic theme: The pandemic changed my priorities, and I realized I didn’t
have to live like this.
Brett Williams, 33, a lawyer in Orlando, Fla., had his YOLO epiphany during a
Zoom mediation in February.
So he quit, leaving behind a partner position and a big-firm salary to take a job
at a small firm run by his next-door neighbor, and to spend more time with his
wife and dog.
febrero.
".
“I’m still a lawyer,” he said. “But I haven’t been this excited to go to work in a
long time.”
Olivia Messer, a former reporter for The Daily Beast, also quit in February, after
realizing that a year of covering the pandemic had left her exhausted and
traumatized.
“I was so drained and depleted that I didn’t feel like I knew how to do my job
anymore,” she said. So Ms. Messer, 29, announced her departure and moved
from Brooklyn to Sarasota, Fla., near her parents. Since then, she has been
doing freelance writing as well as pursuing hobbies like painting and kayaking.
She acknowledged that not all people could uproot themselves so easily. But she
said the change had been restorative. “I have this renewed creative sense about
what my life could look like, and how fulfilling it can be,” she said.
Fearful of an exodus, employers are trying to boost morale and prevent burnout.
LinkedIn recently gave the majority of its employees a paid week off, while
Twitter employees have been given an extra day off per month to recharge under
a program called #DayofRest. Credit Suisse gave its junior bankers $20,000
“lifestyle allowances,” while Houlihan Lokey, another Wall Street firm, gave
many of its employees all-expenses-paid vacations.
Raises and time off may persuade some employees to stay put. But for others,
stasis is the problem, and the only solution is radical change.
“It feels like we’ve been so locked into careers for the past decade, and this is our
opportunity to switch it up,” said Nate Moseley, 29, a buyer at a major clothing
retailer.
traumatizada.
ropa)
Mr. Moseley recently decided to leave his $130,000-a-year job before June 1 —
the date his company is requiring workers to return to the office.
He created an Excel spreadsheet called “Late 20s Crisis,” which he filled with
potential options for his next move: Take a coding class, start mining Ethereum,
join a 2022 political campaign, move to the Caribbean and open a tourism
business. He looks at it regularly, he said, adding new pros and cons for each
option.
“The idea of going right back to the pre-Covid setup sounds so unappealing after
this past year,” he said. “If not now, when will I ever do this?”
In part, that’s because more people than ever can afford to take a risk these
days. Stimulus checks, enhanced unemployment benefits and a stock market
boom have given many workers bigger safety nets. Many sectors now face severe
labor shortages, meaning that workers in those fields can easily find new jobs if
they need them. (Not all of these are high tech; many restaurants and trucking
companies, for example, are struggling to fill open jobs.) U.S. job openings rose
to a two-year high in February, and economists and business owners expect
more turnover in the months ahead, as workers who stayed put during the
pandemic start emerging from their bunkers.
“Lots of things were on hold during the pandemic,” said Jed Kolko, the chief
economist at Indeed.com. “To some extent, we’re seeing a year’s worth of big life
changes starting to accelerate now.”
In addition to the job-hopping you’d expect during boom times, the pandemic
has created many more remote jobs, and expanded the number of companies
willing to hire outside of big, coastal cities. That has given workers in remote-
friendly industries, such as tech and finance, more leverage to ask for what they
want.
Individual YOLO decisions can be chalked up to many factors: cabin fever, low
interest rates, the emergence of new get-rich-quick schemes like NFTs and
meme stocks. But many seem related to a deeper, generational disillusionment,
and a feeling that the economy is changing in ways that reward the crazy and
punish the cautious.
Several people in their late 20s and early 30s — mostly those who went to good
schools, work in high-prestige industries and would never be classified as
“essential workers” — told me that the pandemic had destroyed their faith in the
traditional white-collar career path. They had watched their independent-
minded peers getting rich by joining start-ups or gambling on cryptocurrencies.
Meanwhile, their bosses were drowning them in mundane work, or trying
to automate their jobs, and were generally failing to support them during one of
the hardest years of their lives.
tener".
Las decisiones individuales de YOLO se pueden atribuir a
cautelosos.
“The past year has been telling for how companies really value their work
forces,” said Latesha Byrd, a career coach in Charlotte, N.C. “It has become
challenging to continue to work for companies who operate business as usual,
without taking into account how our lives have changed overnight.”
Ms. Byrd, who primarily coaches women of color in fields like tech, finance and
media, said that in addition to suffering from pandemic-related burnout, many
minority employees felt disillusioned with their employers’ shallow
commitments to racial justice.
“Diversity, equity and inclusion are extremely important now,” she said.
“Employees want to know, ‘Is this company going to support me?’”
Not every burned-out worker will quit, of course. For some, an extended
vacation or a more flexible workweek might quell their wanderlust. And some
workers might find that returning to an office helps restore balance in their
lives.
But for many of those who can afford it, adventure is in the air.
The executive then sent me a quote from the Buddha about impermanence, and
the value of realizing that nothing lasts forever. Or, to put it in slightly earthier
terms: YOLO.
sus vidas.
terrenales: YOLO.
- it is terrible
- I say
- please help me