Ambition once came with a promise: a home, a salary, progress and fulfilment. What happens when that promise is broken? Meet the women who are turning

The soft life: why millennials are quitting the rat race

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2024-04-02 07:30:05

Ambition once came with a promise: a home, a salary, progress and fulfilment. What happens when that promise is broken? Meet the women who are turning their backs on consumerism, materialism and burnout

R ose Gardner did everything right. Straight As at school and college, a first-class degree from a top university, a master’s. She got a job in publishing and rose through the ranks of some of the industry’s most prestigious companies before getting a job with a media organisation. Eventually, she bought her own flat in London.

“I remember walking into my flat, and this might make me sound so ungrateful, but I felt scared,” she says. “I knew I was going to have to keep working at this job that I hated to pay the mortgage.”

It wasn’t that there was anything particularly bad about the job, it was more that as time went on, she says she didn’t feel driven by the consumerism that the companies she worked for depended on. She’d lost her sense of materialism and didn’t get much from going to bars, clubs or parties. On top of that, she had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which made working in an open-plan office with a strict 9-5 policy incredibly hard. Gardner, 42, works best in isolation, early in the morning and in the evening, and she didn’t feel her workplace was prepared to accommodate that. Pushing through her afternoon “crashes” for years had become exhausting. So, five years ago, she had what she called her “Jerry Maguire moment”. She quit. She sold her flat and moved back to her parents’ house in Wiltshire, where she now works part-time in hospitality and handcrafts jewellery and ceramics from a shed in the garden. She has little income, but also very few outgoings.

“My parents are getting older and I pay them rent and my own bills. I have my own little area. We get to live a separate but together life and I see that as a privilege. I meditate and take long walks with my dog in nature … I lost my relationship with myself when I listened so much to what I should be doing. Now, I get a lot more pleasure out of the small things.”