How the Great Resignation Can Help Us Lead a More Fulfilled Life

Earlier this month, the Labor Department announced that 4.5 million Americans quit their jobs in November 2021. For those keeping score, that's about 3% of the entire US workforce.

As experts took to the airwaves in an effort to provide some justification for the exodus, a thought formed in my mind: the Great Resignation is, in a way, absurd.

Of course it is not absurd in a literal sense for people to find greater meaning and purpose in their work after two years of quarantine, to retire early, or to seek higher wages; all reasons given by economists explaining the mass departures.

Instead, labeling the Great Resignation as absurd resulted from the following realization: people who were once resigned to work for organizations that did not align with their sense of purpose and meaning decided they would not resign themselves to an unfulfilled life—and started resigning en masse to find work that better reflects their introspective pandemic experience.

The Great Resignation echoes the writing of Albert Camus, whose philosophy of the absurd stipulates that in life, we will forever ask a question that likely has no knowable answer. How then can we lead a life that is fulfilled?

To see how, you'll have to check out my recent article in Quartz.

(Special thank you to Quartz, who was kind enough to make the article free to all readers).

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Co-authored by David Brendel and Ryan Stelzer, Think Talk Create: Building Workplaces Fit for Humans was published by the Hachette Book Group under the PublicAffairs imprint on September 21, 2021. Now available to order!