Megan Brown, “Quit Lit” as Neoliberal Narrative: The Nonfiction of Burnout, Self-Actualization, and the Great Resignation" (Assay 11.2)

ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
11.2

Megan Brown

“Quit Lit” as Neoliberal Narrative:
The Nonfiction of Burnout,
Self-Actualization, and the Great Resignation

“What happens to the rat that stops running the maze?/The doctors think it’s dumb when it’s just disappointed”
—American Music Club: “Hollywood 4-5-92”

The first time I decided to stop striving was in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001. At that time, I was enrolled in graduate school and working as a teaching assistant. A native New Yorker whose classes were populated primarily by students from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, I spent much of that week processing feelings of shock, uncertainty, and grief, either alone or with students, friends, and colleagues. Many of the people around me were asking simple yet devastating questions. What now? How will our lives change? I met such questions, at least inwardly, with a fatalistic answer: everything could vanish in an instant, so why expend energy on things that might not really matter in the long run? I no longer spent hours jotting down notes on my seminar readings and preparing elaborate lesson plans. My writing—usually done at a glacial pace due to the overwhelming perfectionist tendencies that characterized my entire education up to that point—slowed and then froze. Why prepare for the job market? Why chase after any kind of achievement or socially sanctioned success? The world could end.

Like the much celebrated (and mostly fabricated) post-9/11 moment of national unity and patriotism, my apathetic period was brief, and was replaced by its opposite. The public conversation in central Pennsylvania, where I lived at the time, reflected broader U.S. trends: citizens and elected officials fought about the so-called Global War on Terror; earnest, “life is short” conversations about prioritizing one’s personal values gave way to conversations about grit and resilience, about the all-American return to normalcy, ambition, action. Life had to go on, bills had to be paid, the ladder awaited its faithful climbers. I rallied. I had come this far and was almost done with my coursework. I wanted, as I always had, to excel. I wanted a fancy job at a fancy school, a title, a degree, a record of publications, a house, a family. Despite my fleeting inclinations, I was unable to sit and think and do nothing. I could not imagine any way to get through each day without the neoliberal patterns of thinking that had structured my life.

Reflecting on 2001 in the context of 2025, I notice a similar pattern—striving and ambition reemerging after a period of detachment brought about by a different, wider-ranging crisis: the pandemic. Many U.S.-based writers described a pause in the usual action that went beyond quarantines and lockdowns and workplaces shuttering their offices in favor of remote work. Some addressed a desire to step away from monetarily and/or emotionally unsatisfying jobs. Others discovered or revisited interests and hobbies. Newspapers published stories about avid sourdough bread bakers and sidewalk chalk artists and long-distance hikers—and in the widespread circulation of such stories, that post-9/11 sense of detachment and reprioritization began to intensify and evolve.

This essay is about that intensification and evolution as expressed in popular nonfiction books about leaving a job or career, experiencing burnout, reorganizing professional and personal priorities, and exploring the possibility of talking back to neoliberalism: an economic philosophy emphasizing individual productivity and responsibility that has come to permeate aspects of lived experience well beyond the workplace. These books—sometimes characterized as “Quit Lit” due to a shared emphasis on deprioritizing work in favor of other activities—encourage readers to reconfigure their value systems. Quit Lit urges readers to disentangle their sense of self from their career, with the word “career” broadly defined: some of the texts I will analyze here focus on corporate ladder-climbing, some on issues in academia/higher education, some on monetizing one’s personal interests, and some, even, on the ways that family life and leisure time have become yet more opportunities for the ambitious to pursue excellence.

The Quit Lit call to action suggests, wrongly, that individual liberation from the neoliberal order is possible, and ignores, downplays, and sometimes even undercuts possibilities for collective action or systemic change, such as advocating for underpaid workers or fighting injustice in the workplace. As such, it reinforces a version of the usual neoliberal mentality: you are responsible only to yourself, and you must always be productive. Quitting is not an exit; indeed, there is no exit. The rat race may not always emphasize the usual striving for career advancement, but all the rats are still racing.

Neoliberalism from Economic Theory to Life Narrative

The self-actualization espoused in Quit Lit may seem liberatory or even revolutionary but dovetails squarely with neoliberal values, even when centered in contexts beyond the workplace. These values originate in U.S. economic theory; in the 1950s, scholars at the University of Chicago began questioning the efficacy of governmental intervention in business. The “Chicago School” of economists advocated free markets, privatization, and a significant rollback in the social protections associated with the welfare state. Taken together, their ideas are the core of what is now known as neoliberalism—a worldview that took hold during the economic crises of the 1970s and has become ever more pervasive since that time. The later crises of terrorism, “forever” war, and global pandemic have intensified, rather than disrupted, its hold and reach.

The neoliberal shift in priority from public, “common” good to private gain has affected not only career trajectories and corporate coffers, but also everyday interactions and ways of thinking. For example, the emphasis on private gain continually reinforces the idea of society as meritocracy: those who work harder and develop their skills will succeed, while less productive citizens deserve to fail and, therefore, should not be supported by the communities in which they live. The effort to become a better person must be unending, because losers will be left behind. Neoliberalism relies on such attitudes in addition to the governmental and institutional policies that give it structure. These attitudes circulate through popular discourse and media, including one genre that would seem to stand in opposition to them: Quit Lit.

The quitters of Quit Lit are not modern-day versions of Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, for whom refusal meant becoming something other, a haunting. Instead, they narrate their progress from alienation and/or mourning, to self-improvement, to finding new paths to fulfillment and productivity. The late work of Michel Foucault, and recent scholarship engaging with Foucault’s provocations, offers ways of thinking about these neoliberal narratives. Foucault describes subjectivity as a site where “power…applies itself to immediate everyday life” and posits two definitions of the term “subject”—“subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge” (“Subject” 331). Consider, for example, a college student, subject to a professor, who is subject to an administrator, who is subject to dominant, residual, and emerging patterns and priorities in the field of higher education. The college student as subject is also “tied to” their identity as college student—to the prevailing behavioral conventions and spectrum of social values that shape that subjectivity. Institutions of higher education, as well as the subject’s previous schools,

ensure learning and the acquisition of aptitudes or types of behavior works via a whole ensemble of regulated communications (lessons, questions and answers, orders, exhortations, coded signs of obedience, differential marks of the ‘value’ of each person and of the levels of knowledge) and by means of a whole series of power processes (enclosure, surveillance, reward and punishment, the pyramidal hierarchy) (“Subject” 338-339)

In 1905, Max Weber famously proposed a link between Calvinist beliefs, personal work habits, and the needs of a capitalist system—a link that has intensified since that time. Foucault’s engagement with Weber’s theories on the Protestant work ethic posits that subjects are shaped by institutional reinforcement of norms and values, but also come to shape themselves as those norms and values become personal priorities. The successful college student, as subject, comes to prioritize acquiring knowledge and/or skill, developing professional competencies, and striving for the high grades that accrue to serious students—and it is no coincidence that these priorities help to shape the successful employee or manager as well. These efforts, taken together, are what Foucault calls “technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect…a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being…in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality” (“Technologies” 18).

The goals that Foucault lists are not necessarily specific markers or aspects of institutional success, but are, instead, abstract values that people consider “personal.” The institutional is entangled with the personal, even for individuals who might protest the idea that their schooling or career experiences have significantly affected their way of thinking and being in the world. Simone Stolzoff, in her 2023 Quit Lit book The Good Enough Job, asks a poignant question: “What we often lack—both as individuals and as a society—is the ability to imagine a less work-centric existence…What’s one small change you can make to elevate your nonwork self?” (204). This question, however, presupposes the existence of a nonwork self. In the increasingly dominant neoliberal order, there is no such thing as “work-life balance” because work and life are not separate entities, and thus cannot be balanced. For example, as Andrea Jain’s scholarship on yoga points out, even spiritual, leisure-time modes of self-improvement are now associated with “neoliberal meritocracy… adherents’ ability to discern and certify the merit that leads to the envied lifestyle of balance, wellness, success, freedom, and self-care” (Jain 5).

This issue of life-as-work is central to Quit Lit’s neoliberal narratives. Interestingly, Foucault names “writing” as an important self-care activity and, thus, a technology of the self or epismelesthai sautou: “concern for self” is “a real activity and not just an attitude” (“Technologies” 24). Quit Lit writers can indeed be seen as “taking notes on oneself to be reread, writing treatises and letters to friends to help them, and keeping notebooks in order to reactivate for oneself the truths one needed” (27). They document their decision-making processes and the experiences that influenced these, and they recommend to their readers similar paths to success, however defined. This approach affirms an interesting irony that Erik Mygind du Plessis highlights in his analysis of career-related self-help books: though self-help enjoins readers to live authentically, the genre also—to borrow another term from Foucault—“problematizes” the self. It “construes certain issues as problems” and then offers advice on altering the self that would, in the end, result in at least some inauthentic behaviors and habits of mind: “the cultivation of certain personality characteristics (such as autonomy)… [are] instances of governing at a distance” (du Plessis 37, 39). In sum, autobiographical narrative as combined with self-help is self-fashioning as well as self-archiving—an idea especially pertinent to Quit Lit.

Beneath or alongside its seemingly liberatory messages about fulfillment and self-actualization, Quit Lit celebrates traditional hallmarks of personal success, such as the intact nuclear family or the entrepreneurial spirit, that can be oppressive or harmful for many people. Leigh Gilmore’s concept of the “neoconfessional”—autobiographical narrative focused on personal struggle and redemption rather than on uncovering “the systemic nature of disenfranchisement”—is useful to consider here (Gilmore 658). Her argument, which focuses on late 20th and early 21st century bestsellers but is readily applicable to more recent texts, addresses a turn toward self-help in memoir wherein autobiographical narrative takes on a didactic cast. Authors offer their readers approaches to overcoming adversity and living the good life rather than addressing the social inequalities, including those based on race, ethnicity, gender, and sex, that cause or contribute to adversity in the first place. This increasingly generic redemption arc structure distracts readers from the widening gaps in wealth and cultural capital; for example, even as the mythological American Dream becomes less attainable than ever, U.S. memoirs emphasize enablement rather than constraint, suggesting that there are paths to social mobility via self-reliance and self-improvement. Gilmore’s 2010 prediction that memoir will continue to be subsumed into didactic self-help finds further evidence in Quit Lit, in which autobiographical components are interwoven with pop sociology and pop psychology, smoothly guiding readers through the pandemic and post-pandemic period of social and economic upheaval rather than advocating social change.

Neoliberal Ambition, Always Hard at Work

Rainesford Stauffer’s 2023 Quit Lit book, All the Gold Stars: Reimagining Ambition and the Ways We Strive, begins with the premise that readers will remember the laminated sticker charts decorating the walls of many elementary school classrooms. These charts—measured out in magic-markered, ruler-straight lines, with the class roster neatly written in an alphabetized column—would fill with gold foil stars as the academic year proceeded. The stars might represent hours students spent quietly reading at their desks, or moments when children were “caught” doing something kind or polite, or high grades on assignments. Some teachers would dispense rewards based on the number of stars earned during a specific time frame, but even without prizes on offer, many students would find fulfillment in a long row of stickers: a visible display of their achievements and a way of comparing themselves to their classmates. Stauffer, remembering her own childhood encounters with sticker charts, recalls herself as one of the students who did not need the extrinsic motivation of a cherry lollipop or a new pencil; instead, she confesses that “[r]ather than deriving [her] self-worth, passion, and identity from outcomes of work—GPA, job titles, or awards—[her] attachment to ambition came in the form of being ambitious itself” (2). Her book recognizes the pandemic as a lost opportunity to rethink, perhaps even quite radically, such longstanding American cultural values as productivity, diligence, resilience, and rugged individualism. Stauffer also questions the implications of the so-called Great Resignation that accompanied the pandemic, wondering if it qualifies as a significant or lasting change in our relationship to labor and career. Much as I was after 9/11 and when pandemic quarantine ended, however, Stauffer and other Quit Lit authors seem unable to imagine a worldview beyond the entrenched values of neoliberalism.

Given its centrality to American Dream discourses and other neoliberal cultural conventions celebrating individualistic striving, putting aside the concept of constant “ambition” is difficult, if not impossible. Stauffer sees evidence of this difficulty in responses to pandemic shutdowns and quarantining: “the usual metrics of achievement and success churned on, everlasting even when school and work went virtual for some, even as people grieved, and even as so many sought to protect their families and communities amid a dismal federal response” (7). Even as people posted online about learning a new language or picking up a forgotten hobby during quarantine, they also described the challenges of parenting and working in the same place, or, for the essential workers, the fear they felt when stocking supermarket shelves or waiting in the police station for emergency calls or triaging patients at the hospital. In other words, for many, the pandemic was not really an opportunity (welcome or otherwise) to reset and reprioritize their daily lives. If anything, the pressure to be productive and to succeed intensified, rather than relenting.

Given the neoliberal idea of work as an unending drive for success and self-actualization, the prevalence of burnout is hardly surprising. Quit Lit often addresses this issue. For example, Stauffer, along with Simone Stolzoff in The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work (also 2023), suggests that burnout is an inevitable consequence of the way people prioritize their jobs and careers as lifestyle choices, as much more than a paycheck providing financial security. Quit Lit from the pandemic era also points toward the challenge of quarantine as a catalyst of expedited burnout: with pressures mounting from professional and personal aspects of daily life—and with the separation of work and life more obviously blurred than ever before, given their shared setting—many workers, particularly working caretakers, found themselves unable to cope with the confusion stemming from jumbled responsibilities. This issue might be why many journalists, pundits, and other commentators believed that the pandemic would fundamentally change our value system; as Anne Helen Petersen writes in Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation (2020), COVID-19 could have brought about “a different way of thinking about work, and personal value, and profit incentives—and the radical idea that each of us matter, and are actually essential and worthy of care and protection. Not because of our capacity to work, but simply because we are” (x). This rethinking, sadly, still has not happened, at least not to any widespread extent that might improve the way people live their lives. People still experience daily life as boundless work, and self-help writers still circulate ideas about self-improvement as it pertains to the personal and professional, and readers still internalize those ideas. With this context in mind, it is no wonder that many people become obsessed with, and even addicted to, work.

The idea of work addiction is not new. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the earliest known use of the word “workaholic” to a 1947 issue of the Toronto Star, and credits psychologist and theologian Wayne E. Oates with popularizing the concept in his 1971 book, Confessions of a Workaholic: The Facts about Work Addiction. Stolzoff, following journalist Derek Thompson, offers a slightly different term; “workism” describes the way that “jobs have become akin to a religious identity: in addition to a paycheck, they provide meaning, community, and a sense of purpose” (xiii). Here, rather than being presented as an unhealthy addiction, work becomes a calling and a means of personal fulfillment—a shift that Stolzoff questions: thinking of a job or career as a calling, after all, might amplify one’s pressure to perform well, always. Meanwhile, Petersen summarizes the history of a related concept, “burnout,” that figures heavily in Quit Lit: whereas exhaustion is “going to the point where you can’t go any further,” burnout is “reaching that point and pushing yourself to keep going…the flattening of life into one never-ending to-do list, and the feeling that you’ve optimized yourself into a work robot” (xvi). Taken together, workaholism, workism, and burnout suggest multiple trajectories for discourses on quitting one’s job; quitting is a reasonable and healthy response to an addiction or brainwashing, but it is also a risk to one’s sense of well-being. Leaving a job may mean leaving behind an identity and, as Adam Kothko argues, an aspect of one’s faith or calling; he likens neoliberalism to a religion in that it is “a discourse that aims to reshape the world,” which should be analyzed through the lens of “political theology…the study of systems of legitimacy, of the ways that political, social, economic, and religious orders maintain their explanatory power and justify the loyalty of their adherents” (Kothko 7-8).

So why, and under what circumstances, does Quit Lit advise its readers to quit? Both work and quitting are presented as Foucauldian technologies of the self—means for self-improvement. Staying at work offers opportunities for self-actualization, and quitting offers a healthier lifestyle: opportunities to become a well-rounded human, a better parent, and so forth. Stauffer rightly expresses skepticism about these mixed messages:

Quitting itself was publicly deemed ambitious, like someone was actively choosing to give up and pour their energy toward something better. But ‘choosing’ is the key word. For every person who could quit, there were numerous people who didn’t have the option to walk away…Meanwhile, the so-called end of ambition was presented as an abdication of overwork, a rejection of tying one’s whole self to work and instead committing to live slower and more simply, to watch more sunsets (8)

Similarly, Stolzoff suggests that workism—that unhealthy dependence on work to find personal fulfillment—is a phenomenon “especially common among the privileged” for whom quitting is possible (xv). Even if the “decision” to quit is only possible for some, however, Stolzoff argues that other ways of living should be celebrated: “When we give all of our energy to our professional lives, we deprive the other identities that exist within each of us—spouse, parent, sibling, neighbor, friend, citizen, artist, traveler—of the nutrients to grow” (xxiii). One problem with this idea is that most people worldwide lack the means to pursue these healthier, more nourishing possibilities. Another, leaving accessibility aside, is that many people do not find these other identities fulfilling; they may even find them harmful: a woman who does not want to be a mother raising a child, a spouse in an abusive relationship who might be better served devoting more time to a “good enough” job. Stolzoff’s concern about overdependence on work is, in part, based on worries about individual well-being, but if workism is a phenomenon of privilege, distancing oneself from workism is as well. She hopes that former workists can “cultivate greater self-complexity and distinct sources of meaning,” but this ability is inaccessible to most people (11). Just as the American Dream concept of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps depends on various forms of privilege, so too does the idea of eschewing traditional forms of ambition. For example, Stolzoff’s chapter on relinquishing workism focuses on an interview subject who decides after much internal debate to leave her job and travel in Thailand with her friends for six weeks. Nice work, if you can get it.

The drive to develop a nuanced sense of identity and personal values—advocated in Stolzoff’s material on workism—can become, like workism itself, an experience of endless, boundless effort—another neoliberal priority. This idea is central to a bestselling self-help book that predates the pandemic but has obvious ties to Quit Lit: Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life. Originally published in 2016, Manson’s book begins with the premise that “self-improvement” does not necessarily lead to “success,” and that the pursuit of happiness generally leads to ongoing dissatisfaction (9). Manson suggests, instead, that people accept that happiness itself is a temporary, incomplete, complicated thing: “Happiness comes from solving problems [and is] therefore a form of action; it’s an activity” (31). He concludes that people wanting the “good life” should quit “giving a fuck” about temporary pleasures and pains and about transitory emotions, ranging from hurt feelings after an argument with a friend to satisfaction at a workplace achievement. In his argument, hurt feelings lead to victimhood and entitlement, while satisfaction leads to addiction (the satisfied person seeks more and more satisfaction after the initial feeling fades). The effort of “giving a fuck” is thus replaced with the soul-searching effort of determining what, if anything, is worth giving a fuck about—what seems like quitting or opting out becomes a way of doubling down on solving one’s problems through self-improvement. As Manson takes care to note, not giving a fuck doesn’t mean indifference or inaction; it means recognizing the endlessness of working hard and the unlikelihood of lasting joy. This realization runs counter to some hallmarks of neoliberal thinking, such as the empty promise of fulfillment through ceaseless effort, but retains others, most notably the focus on the struggle for individual enlightenment rather than collective efforts toward systemic change. It seems that we must try to stop trying, and if we do stop trying, we have earned another gold star, for now. This irony underscores the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of thinking one’s way out of neoliberal hegemony.

Neoliberal Ambition from Birth to Death

What about the aspects of everyday life that are not directly connected to paid labor? In the last decade or so, I have noticed that many people (friends, strangers, politicians, celebrities) have taken to using an accounting term—“in the books”—to describe the attainment of personal milestones and/or the completion of specific life events when posting on social media. People account for their lives, and the emotions that accompany their lives, just as they would account for properties or holdings. One might characterize a child’s first piano recital, a long-planned family vacation, or the first year of a graduate school program as being “in the books,” recorded for posterity, ticked on life’s ledger in the assets column. This mindset is criticized in some examples of Quit Lit as evidence of a competitive or entrepreneurial drive being applied to aspects of life not specifically associated with work, but is tolerated and even celebrated in most examples of the genre: why not, for instance, resign from a cubicle drone job and “love what you do” by turning a cherished hobby into the makings of an Etsy shop? Why not apply efficiency models to family caregiving, since the job is unremunerated, and one might as well try to maximize the productivity of one’s labor?

This phenomenon of “accounting for life” and its presentation and replication on social media platforms extends the premise of Quit Lit beyond the workplace but can follow seemingly contradictory trajectories. One trajectory explores the possibility of, as Foucault once suggested, “refusing what we are” by affirming life choices other than the normative. As Stauffer notes, “The linear coming-of-age story has always left something to be desired—whether we think of that as moving on a certain timeline or clinging to specific milestones as if they are a life raft drifting toward happiness. But if those ‘milestones’ don’t feel compatible with our lives, they can do the opposite” (107). Glennon Doyle’s bestselling 2020 memoir, Untamed, celebrates reimagining the milestones, including what marriage, family, and fulfillment might look and feel like; similarly, in terms of career path, most Quit Lit suggests possibilities for the rats to stop running the maze and find their raison d’etre elsewhere. The other trajectory, however, involves emphasizing so-called personal milestones more than ever before. One might think, for instance, of career-oriented individuals switching their focus from workplace to home and attempting to optimize being a spouse or parent just as they might once have tried to be an enthusiastic, efficient employee or manager. Happiness and satisfaction—aspects of the good life—become yet more gold stars to attain.

Family life—specifically, parenting—has long been a competitive sport. This phenomenon briefly ebbed during the quarantine period of the COVID-19 pandemic, when fewer obvious opportunities to assess and compare children were available. In-person classes made way for online, even asynchronous, schooling. Youth sports programs, music recitals, and other extracurricular activities shut down. Now, however, competitive parenting has returned, and the pressures that attend it have intensified, as if to atone for about two years of lost opportunities. Families are productive—they produce not only new generations, but also good citizens: busy, active, engaged in constant self-improvement. The message that families should be productive and ambitious is constantly circulated, reinforced, and even monetized via social media, which “has enabled people to build entire brands, careers, and identities around performing as a good parent” (Stauffer 78). In Untamed, Glennon Doyle laments the perpetual peer-pressure to overschedule even toddlers and preschoolers, and she suggests that this development has little to do with enriching children’s lives: “Parenting is your new religion, within which you will find salvation” (154). Doyle takes this argument a step further by noting, much like psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott once did in his famous theory of “good enough” mothering, that a parent or guardian attempting to protect children from pain and challenge robs them of the ability to learn resilience. In this way, resilience, and the “good enough” parenting that fosters it, become yet more gold stars for the privileged to achieve; some families have no choice but to dwell in potentially insurmountable adversity, and others lack even the resources to shelter themselves. Families with fewer resources may also be unable to provide the kind of parenting “valued by the bourgeois workplace… connections, and a willingness to multitask, and an eagerness to overschedule” (Petersen 24). In these ways, family life and personal experience are, like the workplace, sites of neoliberal ambition. It is not a coincidence that Simone Stolzoff titled her book The Good Enough Job. As Winnicott once did when observing obsessive parenting, Stolzoff worries about workers obsessed with their jobs to the point at which they internalize every perceived failure.

Given these developments in family life, the ever-increasing instrumentality of primary and secondary schooling is no surprise. For Foucault, schools are not only places where young people learn reading, writing, and arithmetic, but also sites of governmentality: “techniques that will make possible, without the full awareness of the people…the directing of the flow of population into certain regions or activities” (Foucault, “Governmentality,” 217). Connecting this concept as well as Foucault’s “technologies of the self” with commentary on public schools, Thomas S. Popkewitz and Marie Brennan ask us to “consider the word learning not as standing alone, but as embodying a range of historically constructed values, priorities, and dispositions toward how one should see and act toward the world” (9). Education is not a matter of mastering specific skills or memorizing certain content, but of holistic development. School is one of many mechanisms by which people learn to be ambitious and goal-oriented: “we’re socialized from a young age to tie our worth and value to our accomplishments” (Stauffer 41). Stauffer likens schooling to a kind of indoctrination, readying children and teens for their roles as workers and managers in a capitalist society. Following Foucault, however, I argue that this indoctrination is not exclusively a top-down process in which individuals (say, teachers or administrators) train students to become compliant workers or effective leaders. Education provides a thorough immersion in a neoliberal value system that assesses and celebrates certain types of achievement, and subjects come to internalize those values, even to the point at which outside reinforcement becomes unnecessary. Then, having internalized the notion that hard work brings rewards (to cite one of many possible examples) subjects may engage in self-improvement strategies—technologies of the self—that improve their efficiency or counteract their tendency to procrastinate.

The role of education in inculcating values of constant diligence, achievement, and self-improvement casts an especially long shadow over short-form Quit Lit written by academics who are leaving, or have left, higher education. Many of these writers have attained the highest credentials available in their fields, and some have even gotten their “dream job,” and yet a sense of profound dissatisfaction, even anger, permeates their narratives. Their efforts to excel have not been met with the sense of personal or professional satisfaction they might have anticipated—a grim demonstration that the neoliberal celebration of individual striving collides with the realities of an exploitative system. The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed have featured many pieces on academic burnout and alienation caused by a variety of factors: a highly competitive if not impossible-to-navigate job market, low salaries for high teaching loads, increased reliance on adjunct laborers, the ongoing erosion of job stability and academic freedom, and so forth. In his overview of recent academic Quit Lit for Inside Higher Ed, Grant Shreve, citing examples that went viral such as Emily Bartram’s “The Sublimated Grief of the Left Behind” and Rebecca Schuman’s “Thesis Hatement,” finds a “philosophical and aesthetic paradigm…that privileges feeling and leverages it to enact change” eclipsing a political or structural critique of higher education (Shreve 2018). He does not explicitly connect this finding to broader cultural trends toward emphasizing individual self-actualization rather than institutional change, but his rather chilling concluding sentence—“we ought to consider whether simply getting others to feel right is enough”—underscores the ways in which feelings, particularly feelings of inadequacy about oneself in the face of unending calls for self-improvement—have caused many of the problems outlined in Quit Lit of all types.

Relatedly, individual interests not explicitly associated with work or family life have also become technologies of the self—activities directed toward self-betterment through self-actualization. Stauffer writes of her interests, “I associated doing something with practicing something, which I further conflated with being good at something, and therefore hobbies consistently dovetailed into more work” (82). In this configuration, free time becomes productive rather than the “eight hours for what you will” advocated by 19th century labor movements: “leisure cloaks celebration of the work ethic in pleasure” (85). Doyle, in Untamed, writes that she likewise struggles to claim and enjoy so-called free time. She eventually begins guitar lessons when she realizes she is jealous of her friends and family who have interests other than work and home. Still, she notices the ways in which people see leisure activities as more opportunities to be ambitious and competitive; she repeats a story from a friend who stays in a hot yoga class even though the heat makes her feel queasy: “Why did I stay and suffer? The door wasn’t even locked” (26, italics in original). The answer to Doyle’s friend’s question may lie in the mindset that yoga makes its practitioners “better”—healthier, more disciplined, and so forth—but it may also lie in the pressure to perform a “nonwork” self that is strong, capable, and constantly engaged in improving.

Self-Actualization: Finding More Ways to be Useful

These ideas may leave readers feeling hopeless, but Quit Lit writers do propose some future-oriented suggestions about challenging workplace expectations while finding other opportunities to self-actualize—and this is, precisely, the problem. Rather than “refusing what we are” in a Foucauldian sense, we are seeking substitute means for finding or improving ourselves that are still focused on problematic notions of well-being, still reliant on the same progress trajectory that leaves many people desperate. Petersen pushes back against “concerned cultivation” parenting—an approach to raising children that she argues has become the default definition of being a good mother or father—because concerned cultivation leads to burnout in children as they age: “[e]very part of a child’s life…can be optimized to better prepare them for their eventual entry into the working world. They become mini-adults, with the attendant anxiety and expectations, years before adulthood hits” (Petersen 25). Instead, Petersen imagines the possibility, however unlikely, that parents will come to embrace a family life that is less instrumentalized and workist. (She does note that families living in unstable environments and/or wrestling with systemic racism have good reason to rely on the constant vigilance of helicopter parents.) Similarly, but with a focus on adults’ experiences, Stolzoff points toward “play” as a “natural antidote to workism. It indexes not on utility, but on curiosity and wonder. It cares not about ‘better,’ but only about our present experience” (77). She advises that people find interests that do not come naturally to them, and hobbies that will never inspire them to strive for perfection or excellence. For both Petersen and Stolzoff, seemingly pointless, unsupervised play and “free time” stand in opposition to neoliberal self-improvement and progress—and this idea matters, because, as previously noted, all aspects of life can and will be made useful in a culture immersed in neoliberal values. Self-care is investment in the self, and people typically expect returns on their investments. In Steve Cadigan’s Workquake: Embracing the Aftershocks of COVID-19 to Create a Better Model of Working (2021), even quitting is instrumentalized. The book envisions a “more honest” relationship between employers and employees in which both parties should expect instability: more staff turnover, fewer long-term contracts. Cadigan points toward technological development as a reason for increasingly unstable work environments—no one can predict what skills and experiences will be useful as new advances arise, creating a culture of fear. He suggests that employers and employees alike embrace rather than fear uncertainty: “The more you change jobs, the more you build your network, the more you are exposed to new business models, the more you are likely to learn new things, and the more you learn, the more valuable you become” (15). In this formulation, quitting has clear benefits and use value: workers become more employable, and employers benefit from workers’ agility and flexibility.

Some of the philosophical underpinnings of Quit Lit have reached a broader audience through popular memoirs. Glennon Doyle’s Untamed, described by its publisher as an “intimate memoir and a galvanizing wake-up call,” provides direct instruction in the technologies of the self—methods for cultivating productive, healthy habits of mind, behaviors, and attitudes. Doyle, author of two previous memoirs and host of a podcast titled We Can Do Hard Things, offers in Untamed an example of Quit Lit in two senses of the phrase: an account of a woman overcoming addiction (to alcohol, to disordered eating habits) and a narrative of self-actualization. When she learns to care for herself, she also learns to care for others, and she feels herself increasingly free from her “formal taming” as a compliant woman seeking what much of U.S. society has defined as the good life: the traditional nuclear family, membership in a close-knit, Christian church community, and a middle-class lifestyle (4). That hard-won feeling of freedom is a “freedom to” rather than a “freedom from”—she leaves her marriage but describes that change as an evolution rather than an escape, continuing to co-parent and remain close with her ex-husband even as she remarries and he finds a new partner; she continues writing for a living but reframes her way of thinking about, and expressing, her emerging subjectivity. Her notion of becoming a “goddamn cheetah” rather than a caged zoo animal means moving away from an existence that feels good enough, most of the time, to a state of enlightenment: “I’m a grown-ass woman now and I do what the fuck I want. I mean this with deep respect and love—and with the desire that you, too, will do what you want with your own singular precious life” (xvi, 201). Much like most Quit Lit narratives, Untamed, as well as We Can Do Hard Things, simultaneously idealizes freedom while characterizing the concept, for the most part, as individual liberation: as Majia Holder Nadesan notes in her analysis of Foucault’s late work, “a discourse of enterprise, articulating workers and citizens more generally as entrepreneurial agents, has arisen” (86). Doyle’s nonprofit organization, Together Rising, is primarily invested in personal development even as it emphasizes collective action, via fundraising, to help specific individuals to support their communities.

Another bestselling author and popular podcaster, Brené Brown, offers similar perspectives on self-actualization and individual liberation, and likewise teaches readers the technologies of the self as they pertain to daily behaviors and interactions. Her 2021 book, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience, is, in the author’s own words, guided by a desire to help people articulate their feelings: “the ability to name this emotion or experience is essential to being able to process it in a productive and healing manner” (xxv, italics in original). A combination of personal narrative, self-help, and references to studies in human and organizational psychology, the book encourages readers to find themselves so that they may connect with others in an authentic and productive way. Much of Brown’s work focuses on leadership both inside and outside the workplace, so it is fitting that many of the experiences (and connected emotions) discussed in Atlas of the Heart involve interactions with colleagues and negotiating career issues, such as thwarted ambitions or ethical dilemmas. For example, Brown writes about reframing “resentment” as a kind of envy rather than a type of anger, first describing her initially hostile responses toward colleagues she saw as lazy or apathetic and then realizing that she was envious of their ability to leave work at work (and her own inability to do so): “I’m not mad because you’re resting. I’m mad because I’m so bone tired and I want to rest. But, unlike you, I’m going to pretend that I don’t need to” (30, italics in original). Popular psychology tells us that people should focus on controlling their own behavior, as they cannot control the behavior of others, and Brown’s account of resentment underscores the idea that attempting to control our own behavior requires mindful effort and, yes, more work: another technology of the self.

The mass appeal of figures like Glennon Doyle and Brené Brown is worth noting here; undoubtedly, avid readers and listeners have found comfort and inspiration in their words on leadership, courage, and personal liberation. Messages encouraging people to “find themselves” and “break free” of situations they find oppressive—whether inside or outside the workplace—can be valuable, but they are simultaneously troubling in that the underlying values of unending ambition and constant productivity persist and intensify, and the “problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the state, and from the state’s institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality that has imposed on us for several centuries” (Foucault, “Subject,” 336). Quit Lit offers paths to self-actualization that can sound revolutionary, but rather than refusing what we are, we are strapping “what we are” to ourselves, as if harnessed.

Narratives about quitting—resigning from a job, overcoming an addiction, or even taking leave of one’s hometown—are not new, of course. Writing for The Atlantic in 2015, Megan Garber provides breezy commentary on what she calls, based on the 1929 Robert Graves memoir and the 1967 Joan Didion piece of the same name, the “goodbye to all that” essay. Garber argues that Graves, and later Didion, modeled a sense of disillusionment that appealed to other writers, but notes that more recent examples—often written by disgruntled academics leaving higher education and by social media users leaving, say, Facebook—amount to little more than self-congratulation and judgmental ranting: a “genre composed entirely of humblebrags” (Garber 2015). In a review essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Lukas Moe suggests that Quit Lit’s U.S. heyday began with 1970s stagflation and acknowledges the profound sense of grief to be found in the genre; rather than emphasizing defensiveness or self-justification, Moe finds narratives that are “slow and wrenching and sad,” even if sometimes preoccupied with “banal questions of self-worth” (Moe 2022). Garber does gesture toward Quit Lit having value—for instance, in the possibility of readers learning about pressing workplace injustices in need of correction—but she ultimately wonders, as I do, if narratives about staying and helping, rather than deserting a situation, would be more effective and affecting. After all, the decision to quit is often an act of privilege, publicly performed by people who can afford to choose. Just as the failure of addicts to quit their substances of choice is often portrayed as a moral failing, the failure of colleagues or compatriots to quit may be met with harsh judgment. Those who stay may be seen or depicted as pathetic failures or soulless drones rather than as people responding to constraints or as people committed to working toward change.

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Megan Brown is Professor of English and Director of Writing at Drake University, Des Moines, USA, where she teaches courses on nonfiction narrative, writing pedagogy, and contemporary U.S. literature/cultural studies. She is the author of The Cultural Work of Corporations (2009) as well as American Autobiography After 9/11 (2017).

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