About two years ago, I hit a particularly low point in my life. The details are irrelevant here, but the gist of the situation is that I had far too much on my plate. Too much stress, too many people depending on me, no time or space to myself, and a complete lack of boundaries regarding doing things for other people. The more I've read and learned about my generation, the more I've come to understand that this is a pretty standard place for GenX to find ourselves at middle age (generally men more than women).

All that independence and dependability we cultivated out of necessity, starting around the age of nine or ten, has become a ball and chain the size of a Mack truck that we pretend isn't there. If we do acknowledge it at all, we get competitive about how little it bothers us.

It's not just people at work or the people in what little social circle we still have; it's also at home. In all of those places, we've slowly taken on more and more because we tend to be uniquely suited to problem-solving in a way that subsequent generations can't seem to even come close to. Furthermore, the idea of doing something difficult that we don't want to do, because the end result is getting something we want, is completely alien to them. Gen-Z in particular has a problem with this. If they can't get an answer from their phone, they either give up on the idea entirely, or they turn to us. Of course, now they're turning to AI and getting us off the payroll. They're already beginning to see that fail, and now they're turning back to us to clean up the mess, and guess what we're doing? We're saying a word that has rarely entered our vocabulary over the last forty years.

“No”

We're discovering through necessity (again) that we can get along without them, without that social circle, without that job, and without AI. Those of us that are still employed are quietly unloading that workload we've been piling on over the years, and electing not to take on any more, while coming up with increasingly creative ways to retire early and leave it all behind.

Another way of putting it is we're fucking tired of trying to protect people from themselves, and we're done. They're on their own. If the world burns, so be it. We'll sit and watch while roasting marshmallows and listening to Billy Idol.

For me, personally, once I understood that I had given away so much of myself to everyone around me that there was almost nothing left for me, I started taking it back. I started making decisions about who really deserves my time and found that the list is incredibly small.

At the start of the new year (2026) I declared a moratorium on new IT projects where I work. I'm in charge. I can do that. I cited cost and time, and the onslaught of federal funding cuts, but the real reason is that I knew I'd probably be leaving sometime in late 2026 or early 2027, and I need to wrap up everything I'm currently working on and start pumping out documentation on systems and software I designed and wrote. The next IT director is going to need it. I'm ready to leave, but I'm not going to screw my co-workers over on my way out. It's not that kind of workplace.

Regardless, this is far from unique. Article after article, video after video, newsreel after newsreel is bringing attention to this. As they do, they're inventing buzzwords around it like “quiet quitting”, “retiring in place”, and a few others I can't think of right now.

We, generally, don't call it anything. We're just walking away, and they can call it whatever the hell they want.

I watched Laure finally join me there a few weeks ago. Things at her job have finally reached that point, and she's too tired to keep rescuing people in other departments from their own stupidity. Holding out a few more years to get a bigger retirement check no longer feels worth it to her, and all she can think about is walking away from it.

She said this out loud one evening. Only a few days later, we signed an agreement with a real estate agent to sell our house. Things are picking up speed now, considerably.