I quit last December and I am FIRE. I don’t regret it for a single second even though it was a dream job and a career peak for the particular niche that I was working in. I don’t think about the topic area anymore either. However if a year or two passes and I am truly compelled to go back I certainly could and would not be behind in my professional knowledge.
As for other jobs, I’m trying to wrack my brains…. There were some good jobs that I had that I was fired from (laid off, but not always). When I was younger and financially insecure this was a real blow. It also hurt because I’m very passionate about work when I have it and I had put a lot of myself into the jobs.
But with decades of life experience under my belt now I have learned that there are many far worse things that can happen to you beyond quitting or losing your job. So no I don’t regret ever leaving a job.
Ugh, this is so true.
I held a very prominent role in my profession, and I'm still involved, so everyone knows me, and even years later, I'm constantly asked if I miss it. And yes, I absolutely miss it, every single day I miss it. I LOVED that work.
But I have learned that I love a lot of things. I also LOVED undergrad and doing neuroscience research. Omg, that was probably the most thrilling work I've ever done. But I would never want to go back. It was so thrilling because I was young and learning, and getting opportunities to do crazy shit that most undergrads don't get to do. My love of it was context specific.
There's no way I would want to go back to sitting in undergrad classes with essentially children and their stupid thoughts and opinions. I can barely stand my current grad school classmates, and I'm not even sharing a physical class with them. Lol.
The things we enjoy are context specific and situated in a place and time. There are some things we loved and could reasonably go back to, like jobs that ended sooner than we wanted, but the further we get from them, the more we can build new lives and new selves who are less and less compatible with those old loves.
As I said, I spend a lot of time with my old colleagues and we talk endlessly about the profession, because that's what we have in common, and the further I am away from it, the more I realize I've grown in a different direction because I've specifically cultivated a life and self that benefits from *not* having that job.
I'm tremendously nostalgic when talking with them, but it's becoming more like being nostalgic about highschool. It's becoming firmly situated in the *past* as a career belonging to a past self who no longer exists.
Even if I could go back, that would mean abandoning the new things I love. I've built this whole new awesome life that *only* works because I no longer have that career. I leaned in HARD to maximizing the benefits of early retirement.
And that's the thing. Life is so enormous. Leaving a job isn't just removing a thing from your otherwise static lifestyle, it radically opens a near infinite number of doors that you can choose to walk through.
Each lifestyle choice you make: education, jobs, partner, location, etc, they all close doors. Every time you commit to an option in life, you close an enormous number of doors. So each time one of those options is removed, you fling open a range of possible futures that you didn't have before.
I actually felt incredibly hemmed in by my career. I tangibly felt the doors that were closed around me because of the choices I had made. They felt worth it at the time, but I was very aware of them. All careers close doors. It's the trade off you have to make to get them.
Leaving a job, any job, explodes the number of futures you now have to choose from. If you perceive it that way and seize that as an opportunity to expand, then there really isn't a lot of opportunity for regret, because there are just *too many* options for moving forward in exciting and rewarding ways.
You have to ask yourself "who can I be now that the bulk of my time/energy resources aren't being co-opted by that job?"