no amount of money is worth feeling like shit from 9 to 5.

So much this. A few years back I quit a job that was making me miserable, and it felt like a huge burden had been lifted off my shoulders. I hated that job so much that it was actually negatively affecting my days off; I'd spend my weekends in a low-level state of dread because I knew I'd have to go back to that shithole on Monday morning. Finding a new job and quitting the old one is one of the smartest things I've ever done.

Quit job answering to a malevolent supervisor making $100 in an 8 hour day and now I work 3 hours a day making $150 answering no one but myself. Ask me how much I regret it.

is that people are borderline sociopathic

thank you for putting this at the beginning so I could stop reading

this is the modern garbage repeated by poor losers, that the average higher level executive or successful person is a 'psychopath'/'sociopath' (by the cosmo definitions, of course)

want to have a good feeling? Get some success in your life and stop trying to reason why you're too good to succeed in today's world... lol

That's good. When you're in sales you can walk into another agency, show them your W2 and get the job. If you're making it rain, people don't care about much else.

However, if you want to work for yourself, marketing products is a good skill set to have. If you want to get into technical work, that's not bad either, but understand you're going to have a long road ahead of studying and gaining new skills.

Either way, I'm glad you set a fine line and acted when someone crossed it! You can't buy time back.

EDIT: I'm in I.T. and I don't even have certs and making a good living wage for a single guy. I should be getting them, but I'm more interested in working for myself so I'm working on launching an Amazon product. It's hard, but when I get there, I'll be able to fulfill my dream, which is travel or live someplace new.

Unless someone works on a tropical resort island and needs an I.T. guy ;) haha

The best position to be in is to have a valuable skillet

So, you're saying become a chef? =)

I totally agree. More importantly, have a skillset that doesn't require coff "support" of a corporation to do it.

I've been out of the corporate world for a very long time and I just could not go back. I'd rather be a homeless backpacker traveling the country than to support some asswipe getting richer off my labor.

Fortunately, that's not a necessary option.

Business, politics, game. Everything is just value, transactions, hierarchy. There are no mysteries, it's all straight mathematics.

no amount of money is worth feeling like shit from 9 to 5.

Can't agree more. At the start of my career, I was still a reactive personality, and listened too much to people surrounding me to stay on the job (it being stable and learn on the side), when I wanted to quit. Result? I fell into depression, and contracted TuberCulosis and had to go through 6 months of Antibiotics. Nothing is worth going through all that shit.

Unless you absolutely love where you work, you shouldn't stay at a single job for more than 3 years. Constant moving up is how to get better pay and better leverage. Your resume looks a lot better with 5 different companies with a range of experience than 1 place you worked at for 6 years doing the same thing.

Great post - I'm starting a new job in 2 weeks, and just broke up with a girlfriend. Both have been making me feel less than my best, so both had to go.

Extremely relevant to me - I'm nearing the end of the first year in a PhD program, and I realized that it was making me absolutely miserable for a variety of reasons, so I'm withdrawing from the program. I'll be living with my parents again for a little until I figure out what the next step is since my skill set and undergrad degree is fairly narrow (will probably have to go back to school).

Come to Spain, with 25% aprox unemployment and tell me the same lol. I'm tired of my IT job, but It's about 50% of my incomes. I have to be very careful leaving this. I'm doing the other half on the internet, so if I get fired I will not hit the streets. That plus public unemployment benefits becomes a little safety net.

Anyway, playing with your job is a high risk here.

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Do you cook with that valuable skillet?

There's actually a post floating around about a Yale graduate journalist who quit her job because she wasn't happy. And the tone is anger and resentment.

I'm not sure if we're attracting misogynistic people or what. But I think anyone, man or woman, is entitled to happiness if they can help it.

But yeah if you're not happy quit and do whatever does make you happy.

Is Web Development something I could do on my own?

This is perfect. Well said OP.

I had a crummy job, straight out of Uni back in Dublin. My boss was a complete dick. Training was non-existant, and they expected sunshine to shoot out of my ass. After they screwed me and 'extended my 6 month probation', I knew I had to make a change.

One year on, here I sit in my office in Sydney, living a life I never dreamed achievable. i am at the start of a very promising career in a thriving city(ripe for any TRP'er).

One of the best feelings I've ever had was telling that asshole, "I quit". I couldn't help but smile. I'm smiling now just writing this.

I was working for a small company trying to juggle 2 or 3 job roles and getting paid about half job role. Made the switch to a large company and now I can focus solely on my technical job. My goal now is to be able to leave my current job before 30 and work for myself from home on a part time schedule buffered by ample passive income.

This hurts me as an enlisted man. Quitting is punished with prison time.

If you get hired for a job,

Your provided value > salary paid to you.

If that basic math weren't true, they wouldn't hire you.

On the other hand, if you can cut out the middleman of your company, and figure out how to offer value directly to customers, you get to keep all of the profits. Think about that.

I've been pussyfooting with quitting my job almost every year. I've been at the same Agency for 7 years now, going to be 30 in two weeks. I want to start my own business, I like the trades, however I don't have a formal skill set. I've been in social services working with the Workforce Investment Act spinning my wheels here.

I want to open up a weekend plumbing service and pilot that for awhile until i generate enough business.

I'm in the position to buy a work van at this time and i know a guy who can do my logos and what not. however, i need to save more money before i can think about quitting as all of this is just in my head. My job is a dead end and there is no competition, i cannot leave my job for a similar job for more pay, its not that type of industry.

Not everyone is cut out to work for themselves, but given the audience here, I'm fairly confident the men reading this are more likely to be the type able enough to support themselves by their own initiative.

Just as 'swallowing the pill' leads you to critically assess the sociosexual interactions of men and women, it ought to also prompt similar reflection on your professional circumstances. We know that employment is a trade of time (labor) for money. To be blunt, your firm makes at minimum 3x from your labor what it gives you. This is a classic accounting truism known as 'the rule of three.' A management consultant assessing a business would tell the executives or Board that if the company's average employee salary was $60,000, then the company needs to drive $180,000 in revenue per employee. One-third to the employee for salary, one-third in overhead (tax, rent, utilities, insurance, etc. as attributable per employee), and one-third for profit.

Some companies do better than this (usually technology-enabled businesses [software has a fixed development cost with no real cap on potential revenue]), and others do worse, either willingly (accommodating on price in order to gain market share, run seasonal discounts, enter a new geographic market, launch a new product line, etc.) or unwillingly (highly competitive market, new entrant posing a serious challenge, one-off [hopefully not recurring] regulatory fines/malpractice lawsuits/settlement charges, etc.) watching that profit margin wane.

You can easily test this maxim yourself. If you're on salary, calculate your hourly wage using the average hours worked per year. (This is normally 2,000 [50 weeks * 40 hours], but more demanding industries [BigLaw or investment banking] are around 4,500.) Then do some light Internet research to find out what a consultant or independent contractor charges to do your job independently. Chances are it's close to 3x your hourly wage.

The point here is that if you're worth $70,000 to Deloitte as a staff accountant, you ought to be able to drive $70,000 worth of business yourself as an independent accountant. $22/hour as a carpenter working 40 hours weekly, you ought to be able to beat the $44,000/year that works out to if you chose to be an independent subcontractor. $140,000 as a fullstack developer at a venture-backed startup ... probably competent enough to launch your own (or at least join an early-stage venture where you're getting paid more meaningfully in equity).

Just as you can't force someone to 'swallow the pill,' however, you can't force everyone to entrepreneurship. Holding your own destiny in your hand isn't for everyone. I'll share a few thoughts from my journey that illuminate how quitting my job brought value to my life.

I became a far better steward of my time. Why would I waste time browsing the web, on social media, giving my time away to someone else in conversation or on a dull task, or doing anything that didn't advance one of my businesses? When your ability to eat is driven by how well your business performs, your time immediately becomes your most valuable asset.

I treasured my creativity much more highly. Before, I'd have ideas come to mind and let them slip away fruitlessly because I was too worried about making sure my work was perfect so all my teams marked me as top-bucket come bonus season. After, I jotted every single thing in a notebook, on napkins, or in my phone. As I built the websites for each of my businesses, chased leads, thought about hiring, worried about products, etc., all those disparate ideas started to synthesize.

I had freedom over my time. If I wanted to meet somebody on Tuesday at 1:30, I could. If I was in the zone and didn't want to sleep one night, I could stay up working until 10am the next morning knowing I could sleep as long as I wanted uninterrupted. Important family event? (Hell, brother cutting down a tree and needed help?) I could be there if I wanted. While I chose not to completely forgo a calendar (I ended up launching multiple businesses and had to keep track of all the meetings), I no longer had that nagging, residual stress of the lack of power over my time.

I had no concern over political correctness. Law 38 tells us "Think as you like, but behave like others." Men with white-collar jobs will all nod their head and universally cite the wet PC blanket as their greatest source of worry and unhappiness at work. If you're entirely outside any corporate culture, you don't have to worry about this any longer. If you end up with employees, you determine the culture.

I carried more respect. When you don't have a boss, you don't have to do something you don't like. Client seemed like he'd be too much of a headache? Told him so and turned down the deal. He doubled the offer? Still turned it down. There's something to be said about being able to open the door to a place that's yours, have someone enter your domain, and watch them follow the rules you dictate. That leads to a stronger sense of self-worth, which leads to a happier mental state, better posture and body language, etc., and over time, the biomechanics and mental frame make you someone who other people can't help but respect.

I could go on, but to keep this reasonable, I'll summarize by saying that many of the traits espoused here and expounded upon in detail (frame, stoicism, self-reliance, critical thinking, self-improvement, resiliency, proactivity) are all very applicable to entrepreneurship. If there's more interest, I could write a fuller post on how and why they are as well as some key steps for anyone considering it.

I've always thought back to my step-dad doing this when I was just a young kid. Every now and then he'd quit his job, feign anger or frustration with the company head hancho's who'd call the house looking for him. Obviously... being a kid... I didn't care much. That sort of stuff was wayyy over my head until I was in my late teens and he explained it to me further when I started working.

My step dad was a very skilled, experienced, and devoted tradesman in a specific trade that has a massive turn-over rate. No one stays for long, people get burned out, etc. This being the case there's a lot of experience divided up by such a small number of people. New people would come, they'd go, etc, but my step dad stayed around, stuck to it, and became one of the best and most knowledgeable in his skill-set. ANYWAYS!

This was way back when.... Every now and then the company he'd work for would offer him a really cheap wage increase. They'd offer him 10 cents or 25 cents an hour more or whatever. He'd get frustrated, tell them to keep their money and then would walk out the door. He'd start making phone calls to companies & other tradesmen involved in the same skill-set. Word would get around he'd quit, people would call him, offer him more money, and eventually the company HE QUIT would call him and offer him a much better wage increase.

He was a sneaky cunt but it always worked out for him in the end. He started his own business a few years back in the same trade and now he treats people pretty damn well because he knows what it's like to be the shit - mouse getting prey'd on by the shit-hawk.

Needed: TRP guide to acquiring money without sacrificing your dignity

Better yet, do the minimum amount you need to do to not get fired at the job you dislike. Actively apply to other jobs while there and then give your two weeks notice once you've been hired elsewhere. It's more professional and then there are no gaps in your employment history for an HR person to wonder about. It's easier to find a new gig while you're already employed. It's the job market equivalent of abundance mentality.

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Before you quit your job, be sure to line up another job. Unless you have a nice pile of cash to sit on while you job search, quitting your job won't solve your problems.

During a jobless stint I took a short gig at some women's clothing store handing out apple cider and donuts I got through an agency. I got in there, did the job until lunch then realized I couldn't stand it because it was the most self-depreciating work I'd ever had to do (even cleaning dog shit in a kennel was more rewarding, no lie.)

I came back after a lunch break, picked up the tray, walked out and realized "I just don't want to do this." So I told the boss I was leaving. She was dumbfounded. She said "This really screws us over" to which I replied "Yeah, sorry" (I guess she didn't notice at least two of her staff were doing fuck all) and then, in an attempt to be helpful that turned out to be mocking, I asked her if she'd like me to show her how to use the coffee machine they were using to heat the cider. I didn't think she'd say yes, but she did, so I walked over and said "You twist the lid off, pour the cider in, and push this little level down and the cider comes out." She then asked me if she just had to unplug it to turn it off...

I walked out of there happier than I'd been in months. I texted my friend saying "If I'm going to have to suck someones dick, I may as well get paid dick sucking wages." His response was "I don't know if that was the best idea, but I also don't know you're caliber of dick sucking skills" I told him it was "$50 to find out."

That period of leaving jobs and situations I was unhappy with did a world of good for my pride and showed me that at the end of the day, if I'm not getting what I'm worth, I'm not giving my skills.

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I love that this post is right up there next to the one about the woman who quits her job in NYC to go scoop Ice cream.

Part of this is realizing that you can do whatever the fuck you want to with your life.

That doesn't mean you have to work for yourself. However, it means you can wake the eff up once a week/month/quarter/year and question what you've been doing on autopilot.

You can get into a great situation if you stop blaming "the man" for whatever shitty job you're in. Forge your path to that baller easy-life gig where you're taking clients out to dinner and making $$$.

Work smart. Build a network. Think about your life.