Most salaried workers share two things: a dislike for their jobs and a reluctance to leave them. Breaking through the inertia takes something big. For some people, lockdown provided that push — the experience of being incarcerated at home, with their nearest and dearest on Zoom, made many take action.
But, for me, the spur arrived five years earlier when my father died. I remember returning to work days after his death, looking around the office where I’d worked for over three decades and thinking: “enough”.
Ten years earlier still, when my mum died suddenly, I’d also flirted with leaving. I felt tired of journalism and wanted to do what she’d done and teach in a secondary school.