Paradigm shifts

Why So Many People Are Quitting

Selling houses, moving cities, quitting jobs, ending marriages

The film The Graduate shows the paradigm shift occurring during the 1960s. The shift is told through the story of two young people who are challenging well-established suburban values. Individuality and gender roles were changing. Toeing the line of the old normal was no longer possible, even though challenging it proved explosive and confusing.

COVID, like The Graduate, is questioning our life choices. Life will go on without mind-bending obstacles if you don’t question the assumptions around your abiding by rules. You will get married. You will have children. You will buy a house.

When you deviate from that paradigm, you’ve got some explaining to do.

The explaining you’ve got to do is about when are you going to get married? Why do you only have one child when you’re supposed to have 2.5? When are you going to settle down in a nice neighborhood and barbeque with your neighbors with whom you’ll grow old?

And, if you have those things, why would you shake it up? You’re winning.

But COVID dismantled that paradigm for a lot of us. People are running across the border. Any border. Every border. COVID has lowered our threshold for what we’re are willing to put up with. We are leaving cities, our homes, our marriages, our schools, our relationships.

Why did COVID have to do with this? Why aren’t people hunkering down, holding onto what they have? Playing it safe? If we know we’re going to die eventually, shouldn't we grin and bear it?

It’s like we’ve had this illness that we’ve been ignoring. It’s easy to live with pain if you get used to it. Our nervous system has taught us to ignore pain so we can get on with our lives.

But then COVID came and our problems became echo chambers.

We can’t just walk around all the time moaning, complaining about the choices we’ve made. No one would talk to us. So, we’ve buckled up and stiff-upper-lipped it, until now. We did come from the Brits.

We’ve told ourselves for so long that nothing hurts too badly. This is life. Suck it up. There are so many people who have it worse.

Staring at walls was like staring into mirrors.

But then COVID came and our problems became echo chambers. We were trapped inside those feelings we’d been ignoring. I’m not a religious person, but it’s hard not to think some greater power wanted to shake us up and wake us up. Ignoring the pain became harder. Staring at walls was like staring into mirrors.

Sometimes, what made us crazy was our houses. Other times, it was the people living in our homes. We couldn’t trade our kids, but we could get out of our marriages. That happened a lot during COVID.

People also moved because they could no longer stand their neighbors. Either the ones who lived beside them or the ones who lived in their cities.

Many Democrats in the South moved North closer to their Northern family and values. An old neighbor, who resided near me in the North, moved South. In the South, her new neighbors admired her bedazzled Trump flip-flops, which I wanted to vomit on or burn in a giant flip-flop effigy.

We realized we were mortal, and this was it. Some moved somewhere scenic and life-affirming. Some moved where there were fewer guns, others where there were more guns. Some moved where the schools were more liberal, while others flocked towards a more conservative education. Our beliefs forced up to pack up and declare who we were.

It was as if we, humans, found something beneath the surface that changed everything. Realizing we had a choice on how to spend our lives was the paradigm shift. It hadn’t occurred to us pre-COVID that this was the big show — not a rehearsal.