![]() “But I’d rather have freedom than a bunch of stuff in my basement.” ‘I could understand what it would feel like to be able to make my own choices’įor much of her adult life, Jennifer Padham followed a familiar script. “I’ve had to make sacrifices to do it,” he said. Walker feels the transition has given him more opportunities to use the “gifts I’ve been given.” He still uses the skills he has honed in the pulpit, but with a new congregation every week. Walker said, “and helping people connect to the important things.” “Now I find myself interacting with all kinds of people from around the world,” Mr. Walker has spent much of the past year on the road, hosting tours in Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam, Hawaii and elsewhere. He wanted more freedom.Īfter acting on a longtime desire to become a freelance tour guide, he moved into a room in his brother’s home. His most enjoyable experiences as a pastor, he realized, had come when he led congregants on mission trips and engaged in volunteer work. But when his church in the Pittsburgh area temporarily shut down in 2020, he moved his services online and had some extra time to think. “They need an ear to share the thing that’s on their heart.” “Sometimes people don’t need to hear me speak,” Mr. Walker, an ordained pastor who quit his job in June 2021 to become a tour guide, listened as the man described his wedding day. Walker recalled recently, the man pointed to Naval Station Newport, where he and his wife had gotten married 65 years earlier. As the boat sailed across Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, Mr. On a sunny mid-June morning, Jim Walker, 53, took in the view from the roof of a riverboat, sitting beside a man old enough to be his father. ‘I’d rather have freedom than a bunch of stuff in my basement’ Romanticizing the Office: As many workers chafe against employer mandates, some content creators are using TikTok to share more positive images of office life.Corporate Cafeteria: As the dining halls of yore struggle with emptier workplaces and the expectations of younger workers, many companies are reinventing the company meal.For remote workers it was an especially lonely, surreal experience. Laid Off in the Living Room: Angst recently rippled across laptop screens, as dozens of companies announced layoffs.Job Satisfaction: Companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars assessing and measuring their workers’ level of engagement, but workers are still unfulfilled and stressed.Here are some stories of people who’ve rerouted their lives and careers and feel more fulfilled because of it.Ī New Office Culture The past two years have changed the way we work in profound ways. “It took a while to find this job, or, for this job to find me,” Ms. Lai, discovered a renewed purpose in longtime goals. Some have made drastic changes, and others, like Ms. Finally afforded the space to consider what matters most, some are now reconsidering their work-life balance. She now mostly spends her free time out in nature, walking along a local river and in the mountains.įor many of the more than 50 million who’ve quit their jobs since the start of last year - a wide-scale phenomenon known as “The Great Resignation” - the shift has represented a moment of great personal exploration. Four months later, she started a job as a pediatric nurse practitioner at a hospital in Seattle with compassionate colleagues and a less hectic schedule. After considering a career as a writer for pharmaceutical companies, she realized that she wasn’t ready to give up seeing patients. “It was jarring to see that and then think about the world I’d be going back to at work,” Ms. Her mother placed an arm around her, and she struggled to catch her breath. Lai walked past people drinking and laughing at a trendy Austin cocktail bar, she reached a breaking point. Some had family members who had been picked up by U.S. Lai said served a primarily Latino population, didn’t have access to clean water. Some of her patients at the clinic, which Ms. Lai had been working 50 hours per week as a pediatric nurse practitioner at a community health clinic in southeast Austin. She was finally overcome by a panic attack. ![]() It was more than a year into the pandemic, on her day off, which she had been spending with her mother and sister. Feelings of professional burnout had left her crying on a street in downtown Austin, Texas, three months earlier. “I remember sitting at that same desk when I was applying to colleges,” Ms. She felt just as uncertain as she had two decades ago. In September 2021, Evelyn Lai sat at the brown teak desk in her childhood bedroom and looked out the window.
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