I was reading A Little Existential by Pooja Lakshmin and got more curious when she started discussing the particularly obvious impacts of the climate crisis in Texas and her desire to have another biological child.
She recommended Anya Kamenetz’s newsletter The Golden Hour as an excellent newsletter on the climate crisis with regards to parenting. Her most recent article was What I Learned After Quitting My Job, and the title immediately intrigued me. I’m always intrigued when people write about quitting their jobs to pursue a more meaningful path. Which reminds me that even though I subscribe to Paul Millerd’s newsletter, I still haven’t read his book The Pathless Path. Anya talked about quitting her successful NPR job to pursue work directly addressing the climate crisis. She said that she had been obsessed with it. That obsession is interesting. I’ve thought about quitting my job too, but at this point, I’m not going to yet. Am I obsessed enough with a clear something else to make the decision obvious? I’m not sure. I care a lot about doing my job in a way that is meaningful and sustainable, and I have the opportunity to try to do that. In some respects, my job is one of the most flexible non-self-employed careers that I can think of. I do have the power to shape how I do what I do. I feel more empowered to do so after getting tenure. But thoughts of quitting my job are still there despite this renewed focus on peace and authenticity. Why? What am I lacking, longing for? I’m a statistician. One of the most rewarding parts of being a statistician is using data to make the world a better place…if I could actually be doing that. I feel rather disconnected from the world at large. I am very connected to the particulars of my job at my particular college in my particular department. But being in my community and my world—I feel this deep-seeded, amorphous lack in this regard. So if I quit my job, this would be why. It would be because I had tried but couldn’t address adequately this need to be in my community and world.