TikTok says it’s time to ditch your exploitative workplace for a lazy girl job. Quiet quitting has been all the rage since Covid. And rage quitting is still a popular option, too. But… winners never quit and quitters never win, right? Never give up? Outwork, outthink, outlast?

Starting to consider whether it’s time to quit your job and start a new chapter is already stressful enough in itself. But these days, everyone has an opinion and it’s almost impossible not to feel like there’s a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other repeating these completely opposing views… Except, you can’t tell which one is the devil and which one is the angel. So how are you supposed to know when to cut your losses, and when to grit it out?

We turned to the research to try to figure it out. We’ve found ourselves agonizing over this very decision one or two more times than we would’ve liked in our careers so far. And maybe you’re in that place now. If you are, ever have been, or ever might be, we hope this helps you think through those decisions just a bit more clearly. It’s certainly helped us.

Can I ask you a personal question?

👋 Modern-day quitting

Over the last three years, the trend that experts dubbed the Great Resignation swept across the US. Nearly 50 million Americans voluntarily left their jobs in 2021 and again in 2022. Burnout, especially amongst young women, pushed many over the metaphorical edge. Many others, however, embraced a new form of “quitting” that emerged in the aftermath: quiet quitting. Quiet quitting does not involve actually leaving one’s job, but rather reducing one’s work to the minimum required of the role, decoupling work and one’s identity, and declining to go above and beyond. A recent Gallup poll estimated that as much as 50% of the US workforce practiced quiet quitting, and found that Gen Z and millennials were increasingly disengaged in their jobs. And from quiet quitting emerged lazy girl jobs. Controversially named and wildly popular on TikTok, lazy girl jobs are not intended to be a dig towards women, according to Gabrielle Judge, who seems to have coined the term, but rather are jobs that “should be paying your bills and have so much work-life balance that you should feel as [though] you're operating at a lazy state.” The name of the game? Anti-hustle.

Why quitting feels like a failure

For many of us, however, quitting in any form can feel like a very high hurdle to hurl ourselves over. As we saw in our deep dive on over-apologizing, women are roughly 10% more likely than men to consider themselves people pleasers, which goes hand-in-hand with a higher likelihood of putting others’ needs first at the expense of our own, feeling like we can’t say “no” when something is asked of us, and struggling to establish boundaries with others. When this translates to the workplace, quitting can feel like a selfish decision that would make life harder for our peers and our managers. At other times, the thought of quitting might exacerbate the feelings brought on by imposter syndrome, which even 75% of female executives say they’ve experienced in their careers. You might think to yourself, “If I quit, it will prove I was never capable of doing this job in the first place.” In roles in which you’re a minority, this feeling might even be amplified. As Michelle Obama described when discussing the challenge of being “the only” woman of color at many times in her life, “you're carrying that burden rather than focusing on the task at hand. And that makes overcoming all of that just even more difficult.” So you might also think to yourself, “If I quit, what will others think that says about the abilities of people like me?” That’s a heavy weight to put on yourself.

And then there’s the matter of grit. Phrases like the ones we heard earlier – winners never quit and quitters never win – are burned into our brains as soon as we’re old enough to understand what they mean and, well, they’re technically not wrong. Angela Duckworth, pioneering psychologist and researcher on the topic, defines grit as “passion and perseverance for long-term goals” and identifies it as a “hallmark of high achievers in every domain.” In one of her most well known and highly regarded papers, Duckworth and her fellow researchers “concluded that grit was a better predictor of success than IQ or conscientiousness in a variety of populations, including cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.” And society certainly recognizes grit in those at the top of the professional game. Tim Cook famously wakes up at 3:45am to start the daily grind of an Apple CEO. Elon Musk famously slept on Tesla’s factory floor, willing the company to succeed. On the surface, “grit” and “quit” – and the people who demonstrate each – seem diametrically opposed. It’s no wonder this might make you back down from quitting…

Why not quitting comes at a cost

Another reason that so many of us find it challenging to quit a job is the sheer amount of time, effort, and energy we’ve already sunk into the cause. But this is as clear an example of the sunk cost fallacy as any. The sunk cost fallacy is ”our tendency to follow through on an endeavor if we have already invested.. into it, whether or not the current costs outweigh the benefits.” It’s the same reason that we don’t end a failing relationship we’ve put years into, that we don’t turn on a new movie when we’re already 45 minutes into a terrible one, that we don’t stop putting down chips at a blackjack table where we’ve already lost $200. We fear that if we do those things – if we quit – everything we contributed will be for nothing, but we fail to recognize that losing what we’ve contributed doesn’t make losing more any better. 

To make matters worse, sunk costs tend to lend themselves directly to commitment escalation, “our tendency to remain committed to our past behaviors, particularly those exhibited publicly, even if they do not have desirable outcomes.” In one of the first of many studies that exposes this behavior, Barry Staw, while at Northwestern University, found in an experiment conducted with 240 business school students that “persons committed the greatest amount of resources to a previously chosen course of action when they were personally responsible for negative consequences.” Another study found that grittier individuals were more likely to engage in “nonproductive persistence” when they encountered an unsolvable puzzle in a set of puzzles. In other words, they’d persist past the point of value and sink more time into a task that was literally impossible to solve than their less gritty counterparts.

When it comes to not quitting, there’s one more cost we haven’t mentioned yet, and that’s opportunity cost. Opportunity costs are “the benefits of options that are not chosen when one makes a certain choice.” It’s important to remember that when you’re debating whether or not to leave a job, the cost of staying in your current job includes the loss of each alternative opportunity to work in a different role at a different company with different people. So you don’t have to – and shouldn’t – think about your life at your current job in a vacuum, but rather in comparison to what your life might look like with a different job.

Why we mistime quitting

Perhaps the most interesting research related to quitting comes from Freakonomics co-author Steven Levitt. In 2016, he designed a study that allowed individuals having trouble making decisions to visit a simple website and flip a virtual coin. If the “coin” landed on heads, they’d follow through with the decision to make a change, and if it landed on tails, they would not. Over 20,000 individuals participated and roughly two-thirds followed the instructions of the coin toss. By comparing the reported levels of happiness of those who followed the instructions, Levitt found that those who flipped heads and thus made the change to, for example, quit their jobs were “substantially happier two months and six months later” and reported they’d make the same decision over again more than those who flipped tails and thus did not make the change.

Even though all individuals who participated were willing to leave their choice up to a coin toss – and so by definition thought there was a 50/50 chance that either side would make them happier – there was in reality a much higher chance that quitting would make them happier. When discussing the “grit vs. quit” dilemma, Angela Duckworth and Stephen Dubner (the other Freakonomics co-author) also recommend flipping a coin on your own when making the decision to quit something. How you feel the second you see the result of the coin toss will likely be a pretty good indicator of what you should do. ;)

As Annie Duke, bestselling author in the cognitive-behavioral decision science space, puts it, Levitt’s research is exceptional evidence that “when we quit on time, it will feel like we’re quitting too early.” What we perceive as a close call, is really not a close call at all. (Duke is also the fourth highest earning female poker player of all time, so yeah, she knows when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.) Because of this behavior, one of the exercises she recommends most strongly for making better decisions around quitting is creating “kill criteria” for a situation in advance. Kill criteria are “the signals [you] could see in the future that would tell [you] that it’s time to quit.” By recognizing these in advance, we’ll be better equipped to make the decision to quit on time, rather than weeks, months, or years later. 

Let us know what you think by voting in our poll and leaving an anonymous comment to share your own quitting story/reflection :)

  💭 Our two cents

In my experience, quitting a job that is no longer the right fit is among the most anxiety-inducing decisions I’ve had to make. The last time I found myself in the situation, I delayed the decision for months. I was increasingly miserable (and increasingly miserable to be around), but I desperately kept telling myself that if I just tried harder, if I just tweaked something else, I could turn it around. I couldn’t let myself believe that maybe I wasn’t able to fix the situation, or that maybe other people just weren’t going to change. At the same time as me, several of my female co-workers were also contemplating leaving the company, so I was able to see the range of emotions such decisions can cause – shame, anger, disappointment, frustration, embarrassment, exhaustion, fear, relief – and realized how unique the experience can be to each individual.

But even as our situations, needs, and priorities vary, we’re all striving for clarity. With this type of decision, it’s so easy to let others’ opinions (or fear of others’ opinions) impact what we do, but it’s critical to tune out that noise for a bit so that we can actually listen to what we want. And looking back after reading all the research above, I wish I had had the right set of questions to ask myself so that I could’ve reached that clarity more quickly. It seems as though we could all approach the decision-making process of quitting by asking ourselves more or less the same set of questions. Sure, our answers will differ, and with that, our choices, but that’s because they’re exactly that: our choices. So what questions are the questions I would ask myself now? I think I’d start here:

• Am I excited to go to work each day?

• Am I happy while doing the work?

• Do I bring a positive or negative energy to those around me at work?

• When I imagine that I have quit this job (not the act of quitting itself), how does it make me feel?

• Am I still learning and growing in this job? At what rate?

• What has changed about this job and its potential since I started?

• What goal(s) is this job helping me reach?

• What are the alternate paths to achieving those goal(s)?

• What is the likelihood each path would allow me to reach those goal(s), and the time and effort required of each?

• Does another path offer me a better combination of factors than the path I am currently on?

• Have I made efforts to change the aspects of the job I don’t like or shared that feedback with the right people? Have they made changes based on that feedback?

• Do I have the plan and safety net necessary to quit right now? If not, what do I need to do in order to have that?

• How might other peoples’ opinions of me quitting be impacting my answers to these questions?

While these questions might not make the moment of quitting less stressful or make the relief after quitting more enjoyable, they might just make the internal deliberation leading up to those times a little clearer.  And while I don’t have any other transformative insights to share, there are a few other thoughts swirling in my brain from all the research above that I think might be worth adding:

• On grit vs. quit: Quitting something that isn’t working (and very likely isn’t going to start working) in order to pivot to another means of pursuing your goals seems, to me, like an act of grit in itself. 

• On quitting as a failure: Ironically, I think my experiences of quitting jobs have been the moments in my career in which I’ve actually learned the most about myself and about the industry I’m in. And to me, that growth and learning is far from a failure.

• On quiet quitting / lazy girl jobs: If you decide this is the route for you (in full transparency, it’s not the one for me), I think it’s still worthwhile to run through the list of questions above every once in a while. After all, quiet quitting might not cause burnout, but it definitely might have opportunity costs of its own.

Like I said, that’s just me. If you agree or disagree or have a different experience with quitting or want to share a quitting story of your own, we – and the rest of our audience – would love to hear all about that, too. So as always, vote in the poll, leave your comments, reply with your thoughts, or all of the above. ;)

 ✅ You should also know…

🚨Favorite podcast alert: At the risk of sounding overdramatic, Annie Duke’s conversation with Steven Levitt in this episode of People I Mostly Admire, Annie Duke Thinks You Should Quit, probably changed my life at a time when I really needed to hear it.

📚Reading list: Angela Duckworth’s Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance and Annie Duke’s Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away are both on our reading list this year.

👂More advice: Jordana Abraham and sister Dr. Naomi Bernstein respond to a very relevant listener question in this episode of Oversharing, How to Quit your Job in a Healthy Way. 

💃 The girls have spoken

Last week’s topic, So…natural or lab-grown diamonds?, produced the most divided results yet. 40% of respondents prefer a natural diamond at least for an engagement/wedding ring, 23% are all-in on lab-grown, and 33% don’t have a strong take. But just like our piece emphasizes, what matters more than what everyone else thinks is what you value. One reader commented that she loves the idea that a natural diamond is “slow-cooked by mother nature herself and that it's one of a kind”, especially given the fast-fashion world we live in. On the other hand, another reader felt like she’d rather have any extra money that would’ve been spent on a natural diamond channeled into their wedding or life together. For us, it’s not even about which side you’re on. Rather, our goal here (as with most of our topics) was to focus on the facts so that the next time it comes up, it sparks more curiosity and conversation than judgment and division. And if it did happen to help you make a decision, definitely let us know! We love that our audience has been reaching out and we welcome all the stories, feedback, etc. 

💌 Up Next

That’s all for today! If you liked this edition of Not That Personal, we think one of your friends probably will too – refer one (or two or three) below. ;)

Have something to say? We’d love to hear it – reply to this email or leave an anonymous comment here :) 

Up next: So...why do we always try to make ourselves small? 

💖 S & J