Why you shouldn't quit your job

"Why you should quit your job." The subject line in my e-mail inbox was too tantalizing to ignore, so even though I was pressed for time, I read Scott Gilmore's article in the Ottawa Citizen.

"Life is short," he begins. "It's go to bed worrying about your English final and wake up with grey hair and three kids short." Since our "productive years" are even shorter, Gilmore suggests, we have no time to waste on things that don't matter.

Scott Gilmore asks us to look at our own jobs and decide if they're a way to pay the bills or a way to do something valuable during our brief stay on the planet. "We should all be doing something important for ourselves, our community, our children, the environment, poverty, or our nation," he concludes. "… You should quit your job, But, sadly, you probably won't."

Gilmore has followed his own advice: He quit "a really good job" to start Peace Dividend Trust, a worldwide relief organization.

Goodbye, Microsoft

As another example, Gilmore cites John Wood, who left a solid management career at Microsoft to start Room to Read, a literacy-oriented charity that serves some of the Earth's most impoverished countries.

The Canadian TV news reporter Kai Nagata reached the same conclusion. He suddenly resigned his seemingly glamorous job because, he explained, "On the long list of things I could be doing, television news is not the best use of my short life." Nagata's blogged resignation touched a nerve: It was tweeted about by the film critic Roger Ebert and elicited hundreds of comments.

Literacy and worldwide relief are worthy causes, to be sure. Still, I'm not about to quit my day job as a music teacher.

Financial cushions

To me, it's telling that all the people Gilmore cited quit "very good jobs." That certainly displays courage as well as a commendable rejection of materialism. But it also implies that they could step into their new ventures with a financial cushion to fall back on. They also enjoyed a certain level of expertise as well as connections to the kind of people capable of financing grand ventures.

More important, is it truly a waste of time to perform tasks we don't enjoy? Even job-quitters like Gilmore and Nagata must go on paying bills, answering e-mail messages and returning phone calls— the sort of chores Gilmore cites as a waste of our brief lives.

Besides, if everyone quit their boring jobs for "meaningful" work, whom would Gilmore, Wood and Nagata hire to clean their homes, collect their trash, manage their assets, cut their hair and service their cars?

A bartender's virtues

Certainly everyone should try to do something important. But when you come right down to it, what job isn't important?

My maternal grandfather spent much of his life as a bartender. How important is it, you ask, to dispense a potion that impairs people's judgment, undermines their immune systems and destroys their kidneys? Yet my grandfather did indeed provide an important service to his customers: He functioned as his customers' de facto psychologist and trusted confidante in a culture where therapy wasn't yet accepted as an option.

Joys of bagging groceries

Or consider the middle-aged man who used to bag my groceries in the Winn-Dixie supermarket in Tallahassee, Florida. Whenever I randomly plunked my groceries onto the conveyor belt, this bagger would sort them into the most logical groups, which made putting things away that much more convenient when I got home.

It was a small thing, but I was struck by the meticulous care with which he approached a seemingly menial task. There was nothing in it for him, other than the satisfaction of a job well done and the knowledge that he had made someone else's day a little bit easier.

Should this man feel his life is wasted if he isn't in a position to give up his job and start a homeless shelter? If he gave up bagging groceries to work in a homeless shelter, would anybody really be better off?♦


To read a response by Dan Rottenberg, click here.