As we're almost to 2018(!), how about a get to know your fellow cohort question? If you're comfortable answering:
1) What do you do for employment currently?
2) What will you miss most about quitting, aside from the $?
3) What are you most looking forward to about quitting your job?
For me:
1) I work in tech, managing a team of marketing managers
2)We get great perks, so there's that. Also, the majority of my team is really great & super smart/fun bunch
3) Not having to do international work travel again. Or, sit through 8 hours of meeting on a Monday.
1) A senior clinical role in primary health care in the UK.
2) Working face to face with patients and immediate colleagues, and the endless variety of brain-stimulating conundrums with which I am presented in the course of a normal working day.
Knowing that if someone in my family gets a trivial medical problem that would benefit from prescription medication, I can sort it out quickly (I do, of course, have an immaculate record of not treating myself or family members for anything more serious than a dose of cystitis).
Using the vast quantity of knowledge that's already in my head, and always being presented with new things to learn.
The way my job defines me as a person. I like to think I won't miss this, but after more than three decades it would be surprising if I was able to slip out of the mantle and walk away without looking back.
3) Getting out of a situation in which I'm fighting to provide a good service in an organisation that's being cut back, while all the other organisations with whom we should share a common goal are also being cut back so work is hot-potatoed around from primary health care to hospitals to the emergency services to social care and back and patients/clients/vulnerable human beings suffer. I realise that by getting out I'll become part of the problem, but there's only one of me and I'll only get one shot at life.
Getting away from the frustrating over-regulation and box-ticking exercises. The systems that have been put in place since I started doing this job might as well have been devised with the purpose of being emotionally abusive to people of my personality type.
Difficult patients and difficult colleagues.
Stopping the long, long working days for which I am too old but for which I can't see an alternative.
Being able to take vacations when it's convenient for me and my husband rather than when it's least inconvenient for my workplace, and being able to go away for more than two weeks at a time. Being able to say yes when a friend texts to say, "I'm in your area, wanna play?"
Being able to go out to play on sunny days instead of sitting at a desk in an office with an opaque window that doesn't open.
Being able to go to concerts and theatre performances on weekday evenings.
Having the time and energy to visit my parents and other family members more often than I do, and being able to provide support when it's needed without having to worry about work.
Freeing up my brain to absorb lots of new knowledge that has nothing to do with providing health care. Maybe even do another degree once I've decompressed.
Having my first-ever experience of being the stay-at-home wife of a man who goes out to work, though I don't expect DH to want to remain at work for very long after I've stopped.