Today at work I gave my two weeks' notice. As now planned, my last day will be Friday next week, thus bringing my stay with Astronautics to a total of four years and eight months, the longest I've ever held one job. In answer to the questions that logically follow: No, I don't have a new job lined up, and no, I haven't even begun looking.
Happy employees don't quit without good reason, such as getting a better offer elsewhere or wanting to move to a different city. I could say that my reason is that I'll be spending the summer with Laura, traveling and otherwise taking advantage of what may be the only time we'll ever be able to afford having extended time off from work at the same time. But this reason doesn't capture it fully. If I had wanted to stay at my job while taking off two months, I may have been able to work out something with management. I didn't even try.
I'm thirty-two years old, and despite all of Laura's jokes about me being an old man, the truth is that I'm too young to continue grinding it out at a place where I'm not learning a whole lot. I feel that's my situation at Astronautics—at least when considering the time I'm being asked to put into it. When I'm sixty-two I might be able to get by on what I already know, but at thirty-two, not growing is a slow death, however comfortable and materially rewarding it may be. This second reason won't be easy to describe to the countless people who ask me in the next few months why I quit my job, but it's closer to being the real reason.
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