Why I Quit _____

I decided I just didn't wanna! And it felt great. 🤗

Links where I can be found: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/2023/01/30/updates-housekeeping/

Need more? Email me: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/contact-causey/ 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

job market journal, Marie Kondo, citizen journalist, Saturday broadcast, podcasting burnout, Substack challenges, Patreon struggles, emergency preparedness, Great Resignation, economic decline, mental health, content creation, personal freedom, business autonomy, decluttering life

 Welcome to the Causey Consulting Podcast. You can find us online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com, and now here's your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In today's episode, I'm going to talk about why I quit, and then fill in the blanks, because, honestly, there's more than one thing that can go there. And I realized, as I so often do, if this is an issue that I'm having, this is something that's on my mind, somebody else out there is feeling the same sensation. A week or two ago, I woke up, it was Monday morning, and I was thinking to myself, I typically try to publish something over on the job market journal every Monday. And as I sat down reading news about the job market trying to collect my thoughts. I was like, why am I doing this? I really stopped and felt present in the current moment, and asked myself, Why am I doing this? And I realized it was just habit. It was like autopilot. Well, every Monday morning I try to publish something on the job market journal, unless it's a holiday, in which case it gets bumped to Tuesday. But this is just what I do. It had become part of the routine, and I started thinking about Marie Kondo and her method for like, if you want to clean your house, one of the things you can do is ask yourself if it's still making you happy. And I did that. Do I do I want to do this? Am I doing it because I still feel passionately about it, and I feel like it's something that I want to do? Is it bringing me any happiness? Is it getting me any closer to I don't know any particular goal that I have in life. And the answer to that question was, no, not actually, I spent quite some time really feeling like a citizen journalist, feeling like, I don't know Paul Revere, it's like the British are coming in this case, it was the job market and the broader economy, as well as what's going on with the Fed, what they decide to do or not to do with the interest rates and so on. All of these things are interwoven. And I really wanted to sound the alarm about that. And I just realized, I think I'm done in the same way that I arrived at that conclusion with the Saturday broadcast. I took some heat for that, because there were certain listeners that they tuned in faithfully every week to hear my Saturday broadcast, and when I stopped doing those, I took some flack. Hey, we were depending on this. This was great. We loved what you were doing. Why did you stop? Well, because I was starting to slowly go insane. I hated reading the same stuff over and over and over. It was like tremendous gas lighting. Everything's fine. Nothing to see here. People move along. The job market is great, churning and burning, resilient consumer. And it's like, ah, day after day, week after week, month after month. How can anybody sit and just read that garbage? I mean, it really was getting to me mentally, spiritually, physically and emotionally, and that's not even figuring into the equation the time, because every single day, I'd have to record a segment and then process it, and then weave all of the segments together, get them transcribed, get them produced and put on the air to be ready for broadcast first thing on Saturday morning. That took a lot out of me. There's a lot of behind the scenes work that goes into podcasting that people don't always realize, especially if you are recording a segment that's going to be produced for every single day of the week. That's a lot of time and energy, and I just burned out. I thought, I've done it. I have done what I felt like was a good, responsible thing in trying to help people. I can't do it anymore. Somebody else needs to carry the torch, take the baton and run the rest of the race, because I'm just done. And I started feeling that way more broadly about my work with the job market and the economy. I felt like, how many times can somebody convey the same message. I also had the same feeling about my sub stacks for me. Now I know I don't. Nobody needs to write in and give me a lecture because I'm not even going to read it. I'm too busy. I got other things to do in my life, so save your shot for somebody else. I. For me, substack has never really paid off as a platform. I wasn't charging for it. I was putting all my content out there for free to increase search engine optimization and be more findable as a business owner. But for me, substack was all like Patreon. So a couple years ago, I don't know what year is it. Now, 2024 all bleeds together. Kind of post two or three years ago, I guess I tried Patreon, and I never had any long term success with it. And I've read the stories of other creators who felt the same way and who experienced exactly the same phenomenon. What I was doing was I would create audio files. So I would have exclusive podcast episodes that didn't appear anywhere else, and then I would also have exclusive blog posts that I didn't publish anywhere else. And I was really curating that content and putting time and energy and intention and thought it wasn't just sloppy nonsense. I was really putting passion and effort into it, because I thought if people are going to engage with this behind a pay wall, they deserve to get the very best. And it was wearing me out. I never had more than a handful of subscribers, and here's what would happen. I'd have a handful of subscribers, they would binge content, and then they would leave, and then subscribers would come in, and they would binge content and they would leave, and then some of the originals would be back, and they would binge content and they would leave. But I never did have people like a consistent, growing audience, month after month, year after year, really making it worth my while, even after I reduced prices, hoping that maybe okay, if 999, a month is too much, maybe somebody will do it for 499, or 399 it still just continued to be nowhere near profitable enough to keep going, and that's how I started to feel with my sub stack. So I'm like, Well, why are you doing them? You're doing them out of habit, plain and simple. You Well, I go and publish my content on sub stack, because maybe one day the right person will find it. I just burned out like, No, I don't want to do that anymore. It feels not good. Does this make me happy? Like Marie Kondo, do you look at this item and feel happiness? No, I don't. I don't I don't want to do this anymore. I've got other things to be doing with my time. I don't want to do that. I just flat don't. I don't want to. I quit because I don't want to. And that's what happened to me on the job market journal and writing about the job market, I thought I feel like a piano that's gotten stuck only being able to play one note, and that's not me, that's not who I am as a person, that's not reflective of my passions and the various other things in life that I find interesting. And I really felt this pull. I'm trying to think of the right metaphor, because I can see this in my mind, but I can't quite put it into words. It's like, I don't know when someone has inadvertently painted or mopped themselves into a corner, like the floor is clean you've been mopping, and then you realize, oh, I should have worked my way back out. Unfortunately, I worked my way in, and now I'm in a bad position. That's how it started to feel like I've been playing this one note, and I did it with good motives, because I felt like people had a right to know, and they should understand that if you only think about the job market when you're on it, if you only think about the job market when it's in a freaking free fall and everybody and their brother has been laid off, you've waited too damn late. I felt like it was important to get that message out, but, man, I've done it. I've done it. I feel like I've done my good deed, and now it's time to move on and let somebody else bang that drum, and I'll tell you something else, because I have said I wanted this podcast to really be transparent and to be authentic and to reflect some real raw honesty. Whenever I started this business, I did a soft launch back in 2019 and then things picked up in 2020 because everybody really that was doing white collar work, was handed a laptop and told to go home because of the and stopping the spread and all of that. And I thought, Man, this is like a monogrammed invitation to quit your day job and go fully and wholly into your business, and when the business was at a point financially where it made sense to do that, I did, and it was wonderful. I don't look back on corporate America and go, golly gosh. I sure miss that. No, I've told you before. I think in the last episode, freedom and autonomy become addictive. The more freedom and privacy and autonomy you get, the more that you want you. Yeah, and in fact, I think I'm going to record an episode about that, because I read somebody's article on Medium. It was definitely a moment of kismet, where the algorithms got everything right. Because I read this woman's article where she, piece by piece, tells people, if you are thinking that owning and operating a business is a gateway to freedom, to autonomy, to privacy. If you're thinking, Well, I can just sit at home and work in my pajamas and never be seen by anybody, that's the wrong answer. And I was laughing out loud as I was reading the article, because it's true. Yes, in fairness to the argument, I have more freedom and autonomy than I ever had working outside the home. For other people, there's really no comparison. However, it's not total freedom and it's not total autonomy. There's still obligations, and there are still times when it's like, oh, God, I have to do this really, really. So I'm paring down those obligations in my life as much as I can, and having that moment like Marie Kondo going through and tidying somebody's house. Do you use this? Do you like this? Do you need this? Is it serving a valid purpose for you? Are you just hanging on to it, sort of creating clutter? It's like I'm decluttering my personal life and my business life at the same time. And I have to tell you, it feels really good. It can be scary at times to let go of something, but it can also feel really, really good to just unburden yourself. So what I was starting to say was, I had I felt like I was in a good place in 2020 in spite of the and the unprecedented times and the new normal, I just kept a lot of faith that things would work out, and they always did. I'm not saying that it was always seamless or perfect, but things did work out. I kept the lights on. There was food on the table. Nobody went without 2021, of course, the great resignation happened, and it was just insane. If you were even halfway good at staffing and HR related work, you could make very good money at that point in time. It was, it was a heady boom cycle. But we know with age comes wisdom and life experience. We know that what follows a boom cycle is a bust cycle, and you have to be prepared for that. And when the bus cycle came, as it always does, you know, Greenspan might have tried to convince everybody, oh, we're not in a bubble. Bubbles don't always have to pop. Yeah, they do. Hello. You know that the bus cycle is coming. And when the bus cycle happened, I really got into a negative place about it. I knew that it was going to happen, and I felt like I had prepared for it, but at the same time, it's hard to let it go. It's hard to let the good times go and to feel like you're moving into a leaner, more difficult period of life, and so much of that hinges on your mindset, because it's like the the old cliches about your mind can become a personal heaven, or your mind can become a personal hell. That's really true, and I went down the rabbit hole of like doomsday people. Now I firmly believe, still yet, that emergency preparedness is a smart idea. You can go back and listen to my episode from the end of May, titled, I survived a tornado, if you need further reference on that, acts of God can happen. Or, you know, who really knows what's going on with that, with these very strange hurricanes and tornadoes, but that's a consarracy theory for some other time we That's something for the nighttime broadcast, not for the daytime audience. But we were on the periphery of a tornado. Mean, Thank God our damage was minimal. But there were other people not that far away that lost their homes. The stores were not open. When they did reopen, they hardly had anything. Law enforcement was out with the National Guard telling people you cannot come here unless we see a valid photo ID that proves you live in this area. You cannot come here. There were looky loos. There were reports of looters. It was it was pandemonium there for a while. So I think it's smart to at least have some amount of emergency preparedness, to have two to three weeks in case you needed to float along, whether that is because of a tornado, a hurricane, a flood, an earthquake, some kind of Natural Disaster type problem, a blizzard in the winter, anything like that could happen. I think that part of prepping is smart. What I think you have to be careful with. And look, this is just my opinion, and I could be wrong. Maybe the doomsday people with bunkers that are hoarding canned goods, maybe they're the ones that are in the right and we'll all look at them one day. When the poo poo hits the fan, and think we were all wrong and they were all right, I don't know. But for me personally, where I feel like it becomes a danger zone is when you start segwaying out of general emergency preparedness and general forethought and foresight, and you get into paranoia Chicken Little it's like the the people that I want to be careful here, because I'm I'm not trying to besmirch anybody's theological viewpoints. Let me think about this for a second. Yeah, okay, I'm not, I'm not trying to besmirch anybody's theological beliefs. Religion is something that is highly personal and highly intimate. It seems to me that there are people who can cherry pick scriptures, and there are people that really in any era, in any decade, they always say that the end is near. We're all about to die. Armageddon is about to happen. The Second Coming is upon us, and you need to just prepare for the Earth to turn into a complete hell hole, because it's coming. The book of Revelation is upon us right now. There are people who have seen those signs for years and years and years and years and years, and yet here we are. The world is still turning. Life is still going on. I watched an old Bob Proctor video, and he said something that I laughed out loud at it, because it was one of those, if you spot it, you got it kind of moments. But he was talking to this interviewer, and the interviewer was, I don't know, it seemed to me, maybe trying to trip bob up a little bit. And he's like, Well, do you just ignore the news? Just bury your head in the sand and not pay attention to the world? And he said, No, I read the newspapers. I pay attention to what's happening in the world. I just decide whether or not I want to emotionally involve myself with a particular story, and most of the time, I don't. And he went on to say, for some people, there's always a depression, there's always a recession. He also commented that when he learned about the Great Depression, he thought that every single person lost their job, every single business went under, every single person starved. But that's not true. There were actually some individuals that went into business for themselves during the depression years, not every business folded, not everybody starved. There was a lot of suffering. There were a lot of people who did lose their jobs and who did rely on soup kitchens and bread lines. Let's be very clear about that, but it's hyperbole to say every single business folded, every single person lost their job. That's taking it in another direction. But to Bob's point, there are some people that were always in a recession. All hell is about to break loose. The Second Coming is upon us. Armageddon is happening. We're all going to die. Some people are like Chicken Little, and they have been for years, and some of those individuals make an entire identity. They make content creation, they have channels, they have blogs and podcasts, etc, around that whole ball of wax telling people Doom porn. And I got pulled into that more than I intended to and I thought, man, everything that they're saying makes so much sense. Look at all of this fiat currency that's been printed up. Look at what the Fed is doing. You have fat cats from the Fed that outright admitted that in 2008 the system died completely. And we've just been on borrowed time ever since then. And you start to wonder, well, how much longer can the can get kicked down the road? Well, the reality is, here we are. Here we still are. I don't know. I have no idea how much longer the can can get kicked down the road. And I'm beginning to get into that Bob Proctor space now, of do I want to emotionally involve myself with that idea? No, not really. Not really. I feel like I gave a part of my life to trying to educate others about the economy, the job market, the Fed, how all of these things interlace together, and why it's good to not allow your career to operate on autopilot. Really focus on what you want. Don't wait till there's a crisis, don't wait until a for sale sign appears in your company's window. Don't wait for a layoff. Be proactive about what you're going to do to take care of you and yours. I feel like I put that message out there and put it out there and put it out there, and I'm just done. I'm over it. It's more than I want to do. It's not a topic that I want to continue to bang the drum on anymore, and so I just quit. I just walked away, like, I'm not going to write this blog anymore. I'm not going to just completely focus on the job market anymore. I have other things that I'm writing that have brought me so much joy. When I Marie Kondo those things, it's like, yes. Yes, they do bring me a lot of joy. They edify me. They feel my spirit and make me happy and excited for the future, as opposed to, well, here we go again. Well, I'm still telling you that the FDIC said it's gonna happen on a Friday night. You better be freaking ready. Look, if somebody hasn't already prepped, if they're not already aware there's really not that much that I can do for them anyway. Seriously, I mean, there's, there's only so much that one person can do for anybody else, especially if those people don't want to be helped, if they don't want to listen. And you know what, some of the people that don't want to listen are going to be completely fine. I really believe that, because they've already decided they're going to be completely fine and they will be. So that's what I wanted to say today. I quit some of these platforms. I quit some of the content I had been pushing out, and it feels great. Stay safe, stay sane, and I will see you in the next episode. 

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