Heroes of 2020: Everyone Who Quit Their Job

Happy holidays to the quitters.

Getty; Mother Jones Illustration

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Quitters, in the United States, don’t get the love they deserve. Stick it out in quiet desperation is the twenty-first century sutra. Quitters have to beat the odds. They face a marketplace that’s no carrot and all stick: constantly hitting new heights of unregulated cruelty, run by giant bad actors who think minimum wage is $7.25 more than you deserve. Whatever finally did it, the story is usually so ugly you wonder how they held out in the first place (bills). 

But sometimes your conscience quits before your paycheck hits—without consulting you—and you realize you can’t, literally can’t, put up with the next grope, the next racist taunt, the next little act of cruelty towards colleagues or clients or customers, and you’re out.

This year, we’ve talked to many people who quit their jobs. They, like you, glued themselves together every morning with anxiety over rent, debts, people to feed, and then hauled themselves back into work. And then, one day, they said no. These aren’t always stories that grab headlines. They’re small, intimate tales of capital and life during this pandemic, like a shelf of chipped and colorful mugs.

Happy holidays to the quitters. Read their stories.

Daniel Moattar

Heroes and Monsters 2020

The staff of Mother Jones is highlighting the year’s heroes and monsters. Find them all here.

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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