Frogs in a Pot
When the first economic impacts of the pandemic began to wane, and employers started hiring again, most of us went back to work--but not all of us. An estimated 4.53 million Americans decided to simply quit their jobs. At first, everyone assumed these were young people in crappy, entry-level jobs, or maybe older workers who had been close to retiring anyway. But subsequent data have revealed that a surprising portion of this “Great Resignation” consisted of people in their 30’s and 40’s--in the prime of their careers. So, what gives?
It’s a principle of physics that any object will tend to maintain its current speed and direction unless acted on by an outside force. That applies to more than just our physical beings. Our love of predictability and familiarity gives us a kind of behavioral inertia that acts on us just as surely as gravity or friction. It takes a lot to knock us off a course that we’ve been on for decades. Sometimes it takes a global pandemic.
Viewed from biology rather than physics, we’re neurologically hard-wired in such a way that the status quo doesn’t draw much of our attention. Even a painful stimulus grows less obvious over time, as we get used to the discomfort. It becomes background noise, and we learn to ignore it . . . until we don’t.
It seems that before COVID hit, many people were stuck in jobs and lives that they didn’t really enjoy, without being fully aware of it. Then the world stopped turning, and like proverbial frogs in a slowly warming pot, we looked around and suddenly realized we were in hot water. It turns out that hundreds of thousands of people went out and started their own businesses. Once they realized the cost of inertia, they became brave, and they acted.
We’re pretty good at protecting ourselves from the threat of rapid, external changes. We’re not as good at assessing the dangers of slow, internal stagnation.