The New Yorker – The coronavirus pandemic threw everyone into Walden Pond. “Last spring, a friend of mine, a writer and executive coach named Brad Stulberg, received a troubling call from one of his clients. The client, an executive, had suddenly started losing many of his best employees, and he couldn’t really explain why. “This was the canary in the coal mine,” Stulberg said. In the weeks that followed, more clients began sharing stories of unusually high staff attrition. “They were asking me, ‘Am I doing something wrong?’ …In early June, the Labor Department released a report that revealed a record four million Americans had quit their jobs in April alone—part of a phenomenon that news outlets called “The Great Resignation.” The Great Resignation is complicated: it affects different groups of workers in many different ways, and its explanations are myriad. Intertwined in this complexity, however, is the thread that unifies Stulberg and the unexpected departure of employees from the mainly small to midsize knowledge-work companies whose executives he coaches. These people are generally well-educated workers who are leaving their jobs not because the pandemic created obstacles to their employment but, at least in part, because it nudged them to rethink the role of work in their lives altogether. Many are embracing career downsizing, voluntarily reducing their work hours to emphasize other aspects of life….Stulberg notes that many of his clients who started losing employees this summer are receiving new applicants at similarly high rates..”