Nobody told you that your job title was quietly becoming your personality. Or that the moment you started thinking about leaving, you weren't just weighing pros and cons — you were grieving.
This week, Pete and Tommy tackle the twin anxieties of work-life balance and quitting your job: two topics that sound like HR seminar titles but turn out to be about identity, mortality, and the specific pain of realizing you've been earning SMILES program letters instead of a raise.
Tommy revisits his brief, glorious, and deeply instructive tenure at MOOVies — a cow-themed children's video store that pivoted to softcore pornography and never updated the signage — as a case study in what happens when you try to reclaim your life by taking a step sideways into something worse. Pete unpacks what psychologists James Marcia and Erik Erikson called "identity foreclosure": the unsettling discovery that leaving a job means evicting a self you didn't realize you'd moved in. And yes, there are five types of quitting. You already know which one you are.
Plus: the Great Resignation by the numbers, a taxonomy of modern exits from the quiet fade to the loyalty trap, and the story of JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater — a man who grabbed two beers and became, briefly, America's most relatable employee.
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