Most people assume they’ll leave a job the way water leaves a glass — slowly, unremarkably, until one day it’s just empty. And sometimes that’s exactly how it happens. But researchers who study why people quit have found something more specific: almost half the time, you can point to a single moment. One event. One conversation. One decision made by someone else that changes, instantly and permanently, how you feel about the work.
Why We Quit: The Single Moment That Changes Everything
Anthony Klotz, the organizational psychologist who coined “the Great Resignation,” calls these moments jolts. Once you have the word, you start noticing them retroactively — the manager who didn’t have your back when it mattered, the compliment that made you wonder if you were underpaid somewhere else, the ordinary Tuesday that suddenly wasn’t ordinary anymore.
React or Reflect: What to Do Right After a Jolt
What’s counterintuitive is what happens right after a jolt. The instinct is to react — send the email, book the meeting, start scrolling job boards at midnight. But jolts arrive with emotional charge attached, and we don’t do our best thinking while that charge is still live. The research on sense-making, which originally studied how people process emergencies, suggests something almost anticlimactic: doing nothing, at least for a moment, is often the strongest option available. Not avoidance — reflection. Recognizing the emotion, naming why it’s there, and only then asking what your actual options are.
The Positive Jolts Nobody Talks About
There’s a quieter category of jolt that gets almost no attention: the positive kind. A win, a compliment, a moment of being told you’re genuinely good at what you do. These should, in theory, be common — most of us hope our working lives contain more good days than bad ones. But negative jolts dominate the conversation because of something psychologists call the bad-is-stronger-than-good effect: negative events catch our attention faster, linger longer, and predict a bigger mood shift than positive ones of equal size. A win at work often just confirms you’re in the right place. It’s the sting that tends to make you question everything.
Leaning Back Instead of Walking Out
None of this means every jolt should end in a resignation letter. Some of the most useful advice in this territory isn’t about leaving — it’s about “leaning back”: quietly questioning the extra, unpaid, unspoken tasks you’ve absorbed over years without ever being asked to. Not disengagement, just a renegotiation of what you’re actually carrying. It’s a much smaller, much more available move than quitting, and it’s the kind of deliberate, intentional response that sits at the center of everything I teach under TimeCrafting (and, essentially, Productiveness) — not reacting to what happens within time, but choosing, on purpose, what you do within it once you’ve had the moment to actually think.