Understanding the Great Resignation

Why People Are Quitting Their Jobs in Record Numbers

My wife wants to be a writer.

I can’t blame her. It’s a great job—no question.

But I can tell she’s not necessarily coming at this desire from a “great job” perspective. No, she sees dollar signs and wants to try her hand at earning a bit of income now that she’s in Prague with me and has lots of free time during the day.

Let me step back, though, and recap how all of this started, and why I think it’s relevant as we—the royal “we”—now push into 2022.

First, the relevancy.

I’m sure you’ve read or heard about the Great Resignation that has been happening in the wake of the COVID pandemic.

Prior to COVID, the “gig economy” was already growing 3x faster than the overall economy, because people like me love the freedom of being our own boss, working when we want, and living anywhere in the world that makes us content.

Post-COVID has amplified the trend.

A mass of workers went in search of new ways of living and earning and found freelancing. Which is why freelance sites have been booming.

Today, 4.1 million buyers are searching for workers on Fiverr, where I have a side-hustle as a script doctor. That’s up from 3.4 million pre-pandemic. And those buyers are spending more—$234 on average per gig, vs. $203 in 2020.

Freelance sites such as Fiverr—a cornucopia of them exist these days—allow for all kinds of income opportunities: writers; designers; artists; tutors in every subject under the sun; translators; handy-men; musicians; voice-over artists; drivers. I bet there are more than 100 occupations I could rattle off and which have income opportunities available nowadays on one freelance site or another.

Now, back to Yulia, my wife (Yulenka, as I and her friends call her).

She spends her mornings puttering around the apartment before picking up her son from school at 1 p.m. Lots of reading. Some experimental cooking. She’s growing a few plants from seeds. Spends a lot of time walking around the city, getting to know Prague (she’s not a local; grew up in Crimea).

She also sees me writing up here in the loft…a lot. It’s something I love doing.

Not only am I writing for Field Notes, Global Intelligence Letter, and International Living, I am working my Fiverr job doctoring scripts, serving as a communications expert for a European crypto firm, and for a U.S.-based crypto venture-capital firm.

Yulenka decided she’d like to earn as a writer too, but didn’t see a way to do it. So, I told her about a site called Medium.

I’ve done a little writing on Medium, and anyone can earn as a writer there. All you have to do is amass 100 followers and you can collect “Partner Program Earnings,” meaning you can get paid for your Medium content.

I earned nearly $1,100 for writing on Medium in December, some of that for stories I’d written in previous months. That’s what really captured Yulenka’s attention: Older stories you write on Medium are like annuities in that they keep paying out, long after you write them and move on to something else.

Yulenka sees all this and has decided she wants to write, too. She wants her own Medium page, to chronicle life as a Russian, living the Czech Republic, married to an American.

Turns out…she’s a really good teller of stories.

She sends me her work to edit, and I am impressed by her descriptive writing. I’ve started calling her Dostoyevsky von Tolstoy. She smiles.

Just last week, she created her Medium account and will post her first story this week. She has three or four other stories already in the works.

I’m quite eager to see how this experiment plays out—a newbie writer looking to earn a side-hustle income doing something she’s never done before professionally, but which she enjoys, and which the online freelance world has made available to her. I’ll keep you posted as Yulenka’s story unfolds…

The broader point, however, is this: There are myriad ways to earn an income nowadays.

The Great Resignation is happening in part because people are discovering the new income opportunities that exist in today’s freelance economy.

Nowadays, you don’t have to remain in some dead-end job that makes you miserable. You don’t have to live in a place that drives you crazy, just because it’s within commuting distance of your office.

You have options. It’s honestly never been easier to turn your hand to something new and earn a side-income or even a full-time portable income…which could give you the freedom to live anywhere.

Check our sites like Medium and Fiverr, and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

Featured image: ©iStock/Lifemoment