Quit if you dare!

I was attending a New Year gathering few days back and it has been a while since I last met up with of my good old friends. Amidst the gang of bankers, engineers, IT programmers, senior government servants, marketing executives, I seem to be the only one striking out on my own, struggling to make my mark.

With much to catch up with, the bunch of good old friends was immersed deeply in conversations. The scope of discussions revolved around topics like married life, family planning, housing loans, latest car launch, ever rising child care and pre-education expenses and so on. The most hotly talked about topic apparently was about work, however, I could not help but noticed the least talked about thing at work was – anyone leaving his present job?

I thought to myself, has it become a taboo to talk about quitting one’s job? Are they worried that the more they talk about it the more likely it is to happen? Or is it just simply the consequences of leaving their present job is beyond disastrous?

The gathering soon became a bizarre affair in exchanging and sharing of everyone’s grievances at work, complains about the higher cost of living due to escalating oil prices, rising cost of education for the next generation, unreasonable credit card charges…a hilarious picture loomed in my mind, I could see all my friends like acrobats, balancing in one hand their houses, their newly bought cars, their beloved families and kids, their credit card bills, their bosses at work…and the other hand, trying ever so hard clinging on to their job…

When it was my turn to talk about my “profession”. I paused for a moment and said, I am jobless, left my job a few years back in pursuit of a new way of life. I could see peculiar expressions on their faces, the “oooh”s and ”aaah”s that followed were as though Ah Meng - the famous Celebrity Orang Utan at Singapore Zoo, had just made a guest appearance at the gathering.


“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenges and controversy.”

– Martin Luther King Jr.