What I Learned After Quitting My Job

Plus, a reader survey!

Hello, friends.

It's an anxious time. Watching the debate last night was really difficult. I'm worried for the future of our country and thinking hard about how I'm going to spend my time and resources between now and the election.

Almost exactly two years ago, in July 2022, I quit my job to follow my heart. My broken heart.

I was obsessed with the climate crisis and what kind of future we were leaving for our children. I couldn’t fit my feelings solely through the filter of traditional objective journalism anymore. Or more accurately, I didn’t want to.

To announce the change, I posted this selfie taken in my daughter’s school garden. The symbolism felt perfect. I was finally going to take time to invest in my neighborhood, spend more time with my kids, put my hands in the dirt, be part of the solutions in various ways.

Watering my garden

It wasn’t easy to walk away from a six-figure job on a national broadcast network. I gave up some identity, some status, some income and economic security, all of which is an especially hard blow in your 40s. (My husband’s job is a backstop for us financially, and I acknowledge that privilege, although he’s also on his own climate career transition journey, so things may change.) I miss my colleagues at NPR, especially when I hear their reporting.

My new career is a portfolio of writing, speaking and presentations, consulting and advising, and other editorial projects; sometimes it feels random and exhausting to switch gears so often, plus I have to manage my own small business behind the scenes (soliciting the work; invoicing for the work; sometimes fundraising and writing grants).

(Come see me at the Patagonia Store in Soho, Friday July 12, and at the Climate Imaginarium on Governors’ Island, Saturday July 13 with Mor Keshet—more info coming soon! )

What did I gain?

Truth, and comrades in the truth. Immeasurably valuable insights. Strength for the journey, and salve for my own climate anxiety. The opportunity to learn and read and think and talk to people about the matters that really keep me up at night. New skills.

Communion, collaboration and mutual recognition with people around the world who are applying their best effort to help humanity cope, spiritually and emotionally, with the maelstrom composed of the ill winds of climate, conflict, disease, displacement, known by some as the polycrisis.

The chance for my kids to see that I am trying to face into this storm as best I can, and leave the world a little better for them.

One year ago, to share what I was learning, and to try to help convene a community, I launched this newsletter.

Since then, readership has more than doubled—we’re now at 6,440 good souls. My goal is to get to 10,000 by the end of the year, so please tell a friend!

It would also be extremely helpful for me if you’d take the time to fill out this short survey so I can learn more about you!

One of the most heartening things that’s happened since I took the plunge is the opportunity to have conversations with people, both older and just starting out, who also want to pivot into climate. I personally know three people who credit their new careers in climate partly to conversations with me, and that makes me feel amazing.

I know that for many people, waking up to the nature of what we’re facing as a civilization, the collective existential crisis is also experienced as a personal existential crisis.

That’s more or less what Jess Serrante confronts with Joanna Macy, her mentor, in the ninth episode of We Are The Great Turning, the podcast I produced.

In the Work that Reconnects, the beginning of the spiral is about your inner work—grounding in gratitude, honoring your pain, letting it transform your outlook and expand your empathy. In the outer part of the spiral, we come to “going forth”—the part that is about your work in the world. How can you act on your feelings and become part of “The Great Turning,” lending your best efforts to a more just, life-sustaining future for humanity?

No, really, how? Jess pushes Joanna for a prescription. Joanna isn’t content to prescribe.

Our world, the world as we know it, sounds like it might die on us.  Okay?  How are we supposed to—we've never lost a planet.  We don't have any experience in the source of life drying up.  There's no preparation for this.  We don't even know how to imagine it. We're trying to pin down and have answers for something that is, by its nature, of spontaneity and, and cannot be ordered.

As Jess and I were playing back the tape of that conversation, trying to fit the pieces together, she realized that along the way, she has acquired some of the wisdom to go forward on her own.

“I want to sit down for once and be like, Joanna, tell me the answer, and for you to be like, here it is, Jess, here. You need to play, you need to feel your grief,  you need to act and remember how much you love the earth, and that's how we're gonna make it through.”

This was one of the biggest aha moments of our entire time working together—when we realized that Jess had already put her “prescription” into her own words.

She also realizes that her mentor can’t come any further with her. Even, or especially, someone as wise as Joanna Macy can’t tell her exactly what to do. Joanna leaves her with these words from Rilke.

Don’t try to find the answers now. They cannot be given anyway because you will not be able to live them.

For everything is to be lived.

Live the questions now.

Perhaps you then may, gradually, without noticing, one day in the future, live into the answers. 

Some links

Countries are failing to include children in their climate plans- for Grist

What daycare workers think about their jobs - for New York magazine