But the glossy, girlboss-style framing of these decisions online can be an over-simplification: quitting a job or a city is not a panacea for all the aspects of your life that you’re not happy with and, unlike a Netflix romcom, making these shifts won’t automatically catapult you into a life-changing next chapter of contentment. It’s much knottier than that.

“When we see short snippets online, we see people saying, ‘I’ve quit my job and it’s amazing,” you don’t see behind the scenes of what it actually takes to do that,” says mindfulness teacher and mental health speaker Amy Polly, who left her career in accountancy in 2021 after almost two decades; she also ended her relationship and moved to a new town. “I do not regret that decision, but it was not easy – we’re now nearly two years on, and it’s a bloody journey!”

Quitting is something I have thought about a lot over the last 12 months. I am also one of those Great Resignation leavers. Last May, I resigned from my job and decided to leave London, where I had spent the best part of a decade living and working, to return to my hometown in the north-west of England (admittedly, not quite as glamorous as becoming a digital nomad in Lisbon or Mexico City). I was constantly exhausted and would go into fight-or-flight mode whenever I received even the most innocuous Slack message. Classic burnout, then. The thought of having to re-enter the chaos of the capital’s rental market when the lease on my houseshare came to an end made me feel physically sick.

Whatever I was doing at the time clearly wasn’t working, I reasoned, so it was time for a drastic change. And there is something fundamentally quite alluring about making these major moves: quitting puts us at the centre of the story, and reminds us that we have the power to get off the proverbial hamster wheel. “Quitting is often seen as a cathartic act – a dramatic behaviour, showing the middle finger, figuratively and metaphorically,” explains Dr Ute Liersch, counselling psychologist at mental health and wellbeing centre The Soke. “It is the last big reveal, the final act of power, the ‘see how you will carry on without me’ before we walk off the stage.”

“I realised a lot of the problem was me”: is it time to change the way we think about quitting?