Haha. I quit my job once. July 2009, working in finance. My next job was two years later, scooping grain at a grain elevator.<p>You know how to tell when the economy is in the last 25% of an economic expansion? When everywhere you turn is another white collar professional under the age of 30 in the middle of an existential crisis. Brace for impact, because we're all about to punched in the fucking mouth. And some of us are going to be like, "What? I thought things were just supposed to keep getting better every year. We've had one breakfast yes, but what about second breakfast? Elevenses? Afternoon tea? Dinner? Supper?"<p>Best as I can tell, the data for this article was collected via freanomicsexperiments.com over the course of a year. But I didn't see what year the experiment was conducted. And I'll bet you all my bitcoin the experiment data was not collected during any year from 2008-2012. Job markets, like credit markets, are very elastic. It's easy to find a replacement job right now, and it's also easy to qualify for a home loan.
Really surprise with all comments here.<p>Quitting your job if you have kids a wife and a mortgage is a much more complicated topic than just saying "F<i></i>* this I'm going to raise cows in the Montana"<p>It's complicated to move internally in a corporation , so thinking as to moving to another company to another position when you have responsibilities it's pretty much like playing the Russian roulette with your finance and your situation.
You should, and the reason is this.<p>When you're evaluating a decision, you have partial information about the extremes. If you've been with someone for a year, you know how bad your worst fight was. Chances are though, whatever it was is a sampling from a distribution that you've only sampled a small amount of.<p>Your eventual worst fight will be worse, because when you have more samples chances are the extremes will be more extreme. (BTW if you're evaluating algorithmic trading strategies you need to think about this.)<p>If you're already thinking things are bad enough to consider leaving, you can look forward to them getting worse even if the underlying dynamics are no different.<p>Note the asymmetry and the importance of the extremes. Everyone who has a breakup story also had good moments and may have mostly enjoyed their average day. But you choose to leave because of the lows, not the average or the highs.
This is biased because the coin being heads only made people 11% more likely to do so, so most of the factor in whether they made the leap was whether they were going to anyway. The causality may not be the change => :-), but instead change+ready+motivated => :-)<p>The title might be better as "If you’re <i>pretty sure</i> whether to quit your job or break up, you probably should"
The big difference between leaving a relationship and leaving a job is that even if you're in a good place, a job will never last for life. Some relationships will.<p>Anecdotally, I don't know a single person that has regretted leaving a job when they decided to (disclaimer: most people I know work skilled jobs). Even when people come back to the same company, it's usually on a different team and with a 30% bump in salary. So I generally agree, once you're thinking about it, it's probably time to go, you'll only end up better off.<p>Relationships are a lot more nuanced, hence the lesser benefit the article reports versus leaving jobs. I'd want to see it broken down by relationship length, age, happiness level and other factors before making any serious decisions based on this article.
I wonder if there's a potential rationalizing effect -- unmentioned here as far as I can tell -- whereby people are simply unwilling to admit to having made a bad life decision, and are willing to lie about how happy they are after the life change to avoid this.
So the recap of this is: Break up, Quit your job, Move to another country, Start a business, Don't propose, Don't have kids.<p>Seems to me like almost of the opposite of what everyone around the world is doing.
Much better put by whoever did the “fuck yes or no” blog post of a few years ago, IMO. (Mark Manson?)<p>This should be how you treat new things. OTOH, while economists say “sunk costs are sunk” and should thus be disregarded, in real life switching has often-underestimated costs (including reputation) so skipping out on things at the first sign of trouble is usually bad.
Did I read this correctly that proposing caused an insanely strong 5 point <i>reduction</i> in happiness? And that having a kid was also quite negative?<p>It sounds like the takeaway is that if you're on the fence about any of these issues, you should quit your job, break up with your romantic parter, don't have kids, don't get engaged, and start your own business?<p>To me, it looks like the common thread through all of these is that happiness goes hand in hand with independence and freedom.
Another way to put it:<p>A "so-so" job (or relationship) is <i>worse</i> than a terrible job, because a terrible job at least motivates you to look for something better.<p>Whenever I ended a so-so job, project, or relationship, the result was always "I should have done that sooner," not "I shouldn't have done that."
"2 to 6 months"<p>It would be interesting to know how this turns out on the long run.<p>I also think that in real life, these decisions are not always about you alone.
"Job quitting and breaking up both carry very large, positive, and statistically significant coefficients at six months. Going on a diet is positive and statistically significant at two months, but has a small and insignificant impact by six months. "<p>Guy breaks up with girl
Goes gym (2 months)
Guy finds girl (6 months)<p>I'm sure we have these chemicals which effect emotion to be overtly opportunistic about life around periods with new sexual partners to encourage reproduction. But I'm just an alien
Everyone wonders whether to quit or break up sometimes. That of course doesn't mean you should do so. The title is miseading. The first line of second paragraph states that data was collected on people that were 'deeply unsure' about something. Quite a lot depends on how much you are actually considering it. Unless you are sure the data in the study is representative for your situation, this study doesn't help much.
No one is sure of anything, this is a pretty obtuse and ridiculous recommendation.<p>A better recommendation, would be: trust your "instinct" and act on it with purpose.
"Both are significant at the p=0.04 level, and fortunately I don’t think Levitt had many if any opportunities for specification mining here to artificially drive down the p value."<p>You guys will fall for anything, won't you?
Hmm. This seems like one of those things that may be statistically true, but the statistic may not be relevant to a given situation. I think there's a term for stuff like this but I forgot it, regression to the mean, maybe?
If you're in an unhappy position at your job or life, you can ruin your relationships naturally, or you can use those relationships to save you. So, leave the job or not, it's based on your relationship also.
Better have a solid alternative in-place before throwing away social or income sheet capital. Up and quitting (hopefully with notice) without a plan isn't smart or professional.