How Dare You Change Your Life
On making changes despite what other people think
Why must you try to be like others, if you are condemned to yourself?
—Fernando Pessoa, from the Book of Disquiet (my translation)
Recently, I was having dinner with a friend here in Lisbon, who made a comment about how people become more fearful and set in their ways as they grow older. A thought struck me, and I said, “Actually, I am less fearful now than I used to be.” She was astonished, but it’s true.
I told her that when I was younger, I was terribly worried that I would not be “good enough”, as measured by my performance: performance in school, performance in graduate school, performance in my career, performance in family building, and so on. I believe that this is very common, especially in a society like the US, where people are often valued based on their achievements rather than on their innate characteristics—or, heaven forbid, their inherent worth as human beings.
In this essay, I want to talk about changing one’s life despite what other people think. But to get to that point, I need to jump backwards a bit and work up to it slowly.
Goodbye to everything
The story begins almost three years ago, in early 2022. I was a university lecturer at a prestigious university in Sweden, where I had been living for many years. I had a job that many other people would have killed for (had the Swedes been a violent people) and a very comfortable life filled with colleagues, students, friends, lovers, and cinnamon buns. And I was increasingly miserable.
I was well aware that I was not happy. Three years prior, I had done something so unusual that it became known locally as “doing a Gregory”: I asked for a year off. Not a sabbatical (we didn’t have those at my university), but a year off without pay. I had saved up enough money to afford it (given a reasonable level of frugality) and wanted to try spending a year writing rather than teaching. That year was one of the best of my life, but, as years tend to do, it ended. And so in 2022, I was in my third year back at the grind of teaching, marking papers, doing research, and performing mind-numbing administrative tasks.
In the interim, other people in my department had started asking to take a year off, but after one person managed it, rules were put in place to prevent anyone else from “doing a Gregory”. Clearly, though, I was not the only one who felt they needed a break.
Then, one cold and cloudy day in January, 2022, a switch flipped in my head. I realized that despite my life in Sweden being very easy—I have spoken of Sweden as being, from an immigrant perspective, a “very comfortable prison”—I would never be happy with the life I had there. I think that Liza was instrumental in flipping that switch. We had been together for a year and a half, and I knew that although she was only recently arrived, she wasn’t crazy about living in Sweden either.
On that cloudy day, I went to Liza and said, “How would you feel about leaving Sweden?” She said, “Sure”. We started talking. We talked about how we wanted life to be. We talked about where we might go and what me might do. And we made a plan. (I will have to talk about our plan elsewhere, but I promise that I will.)
And that was it. I decided to change my location, my job, my career, and the level of security in my life, all at once. I knew that I would miss my friends, but having lived outside of my home country for many years, I was quite used to that. The close friends would still be there.
People thought I was insane.
Mind you, a lot of people probably do make rash and ill-advised decisions to make radical changes, and I’m sure that sometimes it doesn’t work out. About a year into my new life, I read Jonathan Fields’ excellent book Sparked, which is all about changing your life in accordance with the kind of work you were made to do. His number-one piece of advice? Don’t just quit your job and start over—what he refers to as “the nuclear option”. I must admit that it was not comforting to hear what I had done described this way. But his book did help me understand why I had done it. And I have not regretted it one bit.1
What other people said
Once I had made my decision, I started talking to people. When asked how this usually plays out, my union representative told me that she couldn’t say, because nobody (at our university, at least) had ever done it before—leaving a permanent position to do something outside of academia. I sighed and realized that soon enough, it would be called “doing a Gregory”, or maybe even “doing a nuclear Gregory”. I mused that at least I was helping people put names to things.
Having made the decision to change my life, I was faced with the task of communicating this news to other people. This was very, very interesting.
I decided to be deliberate and tell each of my colleagues in a one-on-one conversation. This allowed me not only to break the news in a way that seemed respectful (I was, after all, potentially dumping work on them) but also to gauge their reactions. This led to a realization on my part.
We often make decisions by looking at the behavior of others—what is known as “normative social influence”. Rich Karlgaard discusses this in his book Late Bloomers:
“The findings from dozens of studies on normative social influence are clear: Normative social influence is a powerful lever of persuasion. [...] Normative thinking creates the belief that the right pathway is the one followed by the person we see as a normal member of our social group.”
In other words, to decide what we should do, we observe what those around us are doing. While watching other people watch me change my life, I realized that I was forcing each of them to ask the same question: “Wait, is this something I could do?” Their response to me implicitly reflected their answer to that question.
I found that their reactions fell into four main categories. The largest group of people expressed fear in some way. They said things like these:
That’s very brave! [by far the most common reaction]
Really? Are you sure? Are you really doing this?
Well, you don’t have any children, so I guess it’s OK.
I wouldn’t have the balls!
This last is a pretty honest expression of what these colleagues were probably all thinking. One colleague and friend—a fellow immigrant—took me out to dinner and said, “We’re all worried about you”. I thought, rightly or not, “No, you’re not; you’re worried about what my decision means for you.”
The second group of reactions focused on what my departure would mean for the department:
That’s terribly sad.
What a huge loss for the department!
This is an extremely bad sign for the department and the faculty.
You are a central person in the department.
This is huge! This is a catastrophe!
You can’t leave! You’ve been here more than ten years. All the studies show that nobody leaves after ten years!
I wondered, though, whether these colleagues might be asking themselves, “Is this something I could do?” Could it be that they justified staying in their own jobs because they felt important? But I already knew from my own year off that nobody is irreplaceable.
The third type of reaction to my announcement was to reassure me that I would be missed:
You will be missed.
I’m not happy about it, but I respect your decision. You will be missed.
If you think you won’t be missed, you are terribly mistaken.
You will be missed. I appreciate you very much as a colleague and as a friend.
In these cases, while I appreciated the sentiment, I again asked myself whether this was perhaps what they would like to hear if they were leaving. I mean, who doesn’t want to feel indispensable? I also wondered whether there wasn’t, even at an unconscious level, a sense of “Oh, maybe I should have been more appreciative, and maybe even... friendly.” Of course, I will never know. But I can point out that the colleague who called me a friend had never once invited me out for drinks, or to dinner, or to their house, or to their cabin by a lake—which, over the course of ten years, there had surely been time for.
The fourth category of response was very different in nature and came from those few colleagues for whom the idea of leaving was clearly attractive:
I’m so happy for you. I think you’re doing the right thing, and I support your decision.
That’s the best plan ever! [on our upcoming travel plans]
Congratulations! [on my saying I was leaving academia]
These, clearly, were the colleagues who could see themselves “doing a Gregory”. Their support meant a lot to me, and perhaps my decision helped them a bit in their thinking about their own career.
There is actually one last category of response, which, fascinatingly, only came from friends of mine who were, once upon a time, my own students. Three of these said the exact same thing:
I feel so sorry for all the students who will never have you as a teacher.
To be honest, this was the reaction that moved me the most by far. I realized that it was the teaching—and even more so, my relationship with my students—that had kept me going for all these years. If I would miss nothing else in this job, I would miss that. But I also wasn’t going to stay and be miserable just for the sake of those putative future students.
What other people think
I once had a therapist who questioned my tendency to talk about “what most people think” or “what other people would say”. He asked me how I knew what other people think. Isn’t that, in fact, he said, the one thing we can never really know? He helped me to see that my head was populated by faceless people who were actually nothing more than sticks onto which expectations had been glued. And the expectations were my own. They were the things that I was afraid others were thinking about me.
After thinking about this long and hard, I came to a realization: People actually don’t care very much what I do.
Alain de Botton with a very artistic message on why others really don’t care
Most people do not expend much energy thinking about others; instead, they expend energy thinking about others thinking about them. I believe that this is especially true in the Swedish context, where imagined censure is a driving force of the culture. Thinking about this, I realized that we are all just punishing ourselves. Like the monkey with its fist in the coconut trap, all we have to do is simply let go.
And so I let go. I realized that despite their words of dismay or concern, other people don’t really care what I do. Having internalized that, I was able to begin to live a life based on my own values and my own ambitions, rather than on others’ expectations or my “performance”. The result has been a life that is not easy (really not easy, sometimes) but is immensely fulfilling.
Would I recommend that others quit their job and change their life? No, but I would recommend that they ask two questions: First, “Have I deliberately chosen the life I am living?” And second, “Is this life in accordance with my values?” If the answer to both questions is “yes”, then everything is good. If not, the next step is to consider what changes might bring both answers round to a “yes”. It might not take very much.
Today, three years after I decided to change my life, I am living in a different country, am doing different work, am surrounded by different people with different customs—and although I sometimes weep with frustration, I enjoy every day. I have found the specific thing that I want to do, and I believe that the most important step in the process was deciding that what other people think about my life really doesn’t matter. And that is a large part of why, as I said to my friend over dinner, I am now less fearful than before.
What has your experience been?
I want to state clearly that I am well aware of my level of privilege, and that many of the changes I decided to make were possible only thanks to the money I had been able to save up. I recognize that globally, very few people are in such an advantageous position, and I am very grateful for the privileges that have given me these opportunities.
Thank you, Mike! Yes, I did. As someone who taught both English and writing for years, I am quite aware of all of the rules about writing. But as a writer, I am also aware that it’s sometimes most effective to flout the rules. In this particular case, the title is interrogative only in the most facile, syntactic sense. Functionally, it is a challenge (an interjection), and could be written “How dare you change your life!” But I elected to leave it without punctuation, thus forcing the reader to do a bit more work to figure out what it means, which hopefully generates more engagement. At least, that was my thinking.
Living a life that doesn’t meet people’s expectations is both easier and harder than I thought. Easier because, like you say, people are too busy with their own lives to notice or care much. Harder because it forces you to make your own decisions in life, without the comfort of making the expected, mainstream decisions. You’re kind of traveling through the unknown.
I consider you a role model for how to happily live a more unconventional life, and you have helped me a lot in my own journey through the unknown. Thank you.