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Quitting your job in your 30s with no solid plan is generally considered poor decision-making. Doing it because you watched The Big Lebowski is probably even worse. But as I faced up to what would be my eighth year in an IT role, I watched Jeff Bridges meandering his way through the chaos of life in a dressing gown. And I found myself thinking: maybe the Dude had it figured out.
For most of my working life, my identity has been strongly bolstered by work: doing well career-wise felt like evidence of my utility and respectability (despite the fact no one ever really understood what my job was anyway). And, like most millennials, I’d felt exceptionally lucky to eventually get a grad job out of university at all, especially one that paid more than a “living wage”. On top of that, as a second generation immigrant, I’d been repeatedly told from a young age that being jobless is a terrible state of affairs.
I had been unhappy for some time, but leaving without a new role to go to had always seemed totally unthinkable. But life has a funny way of telling you when you’re no longer where you should be; against my will, I was moved to another department, with a nightmare boss. I then got another role where the colleagues were lovely, but the job felt deeply uncreative and uninteresting. Shortly after, senior leadership began talking about job cuts – it was clear we were expected to do just as much with even less.
When two years earlier I’d watched the Coen Brothers’ 1998 classic The Big Lebowski, I’d spent much of it scrolling on my phone and then stupidly wondering why I wasn’t finding the film particularly interesting. But this summer, facing a dreaded project that I had almost no passion for, and with little else to distract me, I watched it properly for the first time. I was completely captivated. I watched it every day for a week, read bits of the script and scoured the internet for any half-decent podcasts about it, so I could figure out why a film that seemed so ridiculous also meant so much to me.
A lot of people have described encountering “Dude-ism” as a quasi-religious experience, and there was certainly something philosophical about my sudden affection for the film. The attitude of Jeff Bridges’s bowling-obsessed slacker the Dude is to “take it easy” in a chaotic world that is constantly trying to push him into urgency and action. One of his antagonists, the philanthropist known as “the Big Lebowski”, represents the absurdity of modern, capitalist life, screaming “get a job sir!” and “the bums will always lose!” The Dude is treated by most as an unemployed waster against the backdrop of the 90s economic boom. But by the end of the film it’s difficult not to believe that the Dude is the one who’s really rich in life. He keeps his inner tranquility, despite all the madness around him.
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I knew I’d been losing myself, getting sucked into workplace politics or tasks that I didn’t care about any more. The final straw came in a meeting with a manager, where I was being encouraged to learn more skills for a role from which I was already mentally checking out. “What would the Dude do?” I asked myself. I already had my answer.
Not everyone initially thought it was a great idea. “But what if your boiler broke down?” my mum exclaimed, having anxiously predicted any little thing that could go awry. Still, my mind was made up. I handed in my notice with nothing in particular lined up and an acceptance that life is full of “strikes and gutters”.
One of the most strikingly beautiful aspects of The Big Lebowski is the bowling alley the Dude goes to, a space of habitual calm and simplicity. Since leaving I’ve reimmersed myself more in those small rituals of peace, repetition and community; cooking a meal from scratch in peace and quiet, grabbing a coffee with a friend to talk about nothing much at all. Outside the demands of full-time work, I’ve been able to remember what’s really important in life.
I’m not exactly living like the Dude; after all I still have a mortgage to pay. For now, I’m living off the savings I built up from my old job, a small income from the media and education platform I’m continuing to fundraise for, and bits of journalism work on the side.
I know much of that is a privilege – but I’m grateful to have the choice to live at a slower pace, on my own terms. And if you still think my decision to be jobless was a bad idea, well that’s just, like, your opinion, man.
