It was the best thing I’ve ever done for myself.

Six months ago I left a well-paying job, health insurance, and a daily routine. Some of you secretly thought I was crazy; others of you wished you had the courage I had. But what none of you knew was just how close to spiritual death I came.

Our mid-20s is the most consequential period of our lives. Not just because we leave the nest to start our own lives. And certainly not because we’ve reached the last major milestone of growing up—being able to rent a car. (Although Uber is turning that into an obsolescence anyways). After our first couple years into adulthood we are prompted with a decision: do we live or we die. 

I’m not talking about physical death—we all die someday. I’m talking about the soul. The raison d’être for our existence. The thing that keeps psychiatrists employed and preachers preaching.

Most of us choose to die in our 20s. We give up our hopes and dreams for stability, milestones, and life’s accessories. The idea of losing a paycheck isn’t a risk many of us think is worth taking. We would rather take a stagnant wage and a couple days’ worth of PTO each year to avoid the unknown. We trade goals for milestones—getting married, buying a home, having kids. But when the fear and the milestones aren’t enough, we begin to accessorize. We get cars we don’t need, furnish homes we can’t afford, and we use our children as mediums upon which we project our perfect visions of ourselves upon.

For the past several years I’ve been in the midst of a crisis. Not because I don’t know what I want to do with my life. Rather, because I know exactly what I don’t want—a house with a white picket fence and 2.4 children. I don’t want to accessorize my life, and I most certainly don’t want to earn a paycheck for the sake of earning a paycheck. What I realized over the past year is that the quarter life crisis I thought I’ve been having was never really a crisis at all. Rather, it was a precipice. I had come to the fork in the road of my life’s journey and it was time to decide: do I choose to live, or do I choose to die?

I had plateaued. I stopped growing, I wasn’t learning…I was existing, but certainly not living. My job was at the root of it all. To my employer, I was a billable hour sitting at a desk. To my supervisors, I was a child, incapable of taking responsibility for my own actions. I wasn’t permitted to make mistakes for fear the client would get upset. The client wanted cheap, junior level laborers. No one was willing to invest in me and my hands were tied for me to invest in myself. I was boxed in. It was a stagnant position I could never grow from. 

My soul kept telling me to do something. But I didn’t quite know what to do. We are programed to be obedient employees. We are told you can’t just quit your job, even if you’re in a toxic work environment. We are told over and over again to do the time now and reap the career benefits later.
That wasn’t enough for me. I had to go. So I did.

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.” —J. K. Rowling

Leaving my job wasn’t easy, and looking back, it was perilous. I didn’t have an emergency fund, I don’t have a spouse with health care privileges, and I have a ton of debt. Regardless of all the reasons not to leave my job, I did it anyways. From it all, I learned some valuable lessons I could only have learned by quitting my job.

• Leaving enabled me to start thinking differently. Before I left my job, Amazon solved all of my problems. If I didn’t have something I needed I simply ordered it. When my own resources became scarce, I adopted a new mindset: use what I have. It was like the dusty, old lightbulb in my head had suddenly come to life. I began to actually think through problems in ways I hadn’t before. And the best part? The satisfaction of solving those problems with a little bit of ingenuity…and some duct tape. 

• My job enabled my self-entitlement. My salary made me feel like I could do whatever I damn well pleased because I had earned it. Would it surprise you that I had to become really poor to learn the value of a dollar? I used money like we all do—to satiate the numbness in our lives. I took a trip to Iceland I hadn’t saved up for and regularly spent the equivalent of a home mortgage each month just on food…for myself.  Stopping my own cash flow and breaking the bank was a formative experience I needed to have. I needed to see that money is a means to the bigger end my soul is yearning for.

• I permitted myself to make mistakes. Learning is the food of my soul. I need to be constantly be pushed to the limits. Constantly challenged. My soul needs to experience the feeling of elation when discovering something new. Making mistakes is the best way I know how to do just that. Spending over two years in a job that actively stimied me from making mistakes wasn’t just bad for my professional growth–it suffocated my soul.

The last six months have been the hardest of my life. I depleted my meager life’s savings, racked up an unconscionable amount of debt, and juggled working several minimum wage jobs. I dreaded the first of the month like I’ve never dread it before. I gambled on my health and went a couple months without insurance hoping and praying I wouldn’t get sick. And everyday I wondered if I had failed.

I didn’t. The feeling of failure comes when you are on the cusp of deciding; failure comes when you do nothing at all. You muddle your way into spiritual death. You accessorize the shit out of your career, home, or family until your physical being dies too. I quit my job without a plan because my soul needed me to. And that’s that.