Why I joined ‘Generation Resignation’
A Colombian holiday convinced Pravina Rudra to abandon her career as a management consultant
Astudy released late this summer suggested my age group – Gen Z and Millennials – are the core contingent of Generation Resignation: a tribe which has ditched its conventional, stable jobs to pursue a passion. The pandemic has no doubt played its part in this, but for many the feelings were already there. I’m 27 now, but just over two years ago, aged 24, I moved from a sensible career in business into the free-for-all of journalism. What do I hold responsible? Strangely, the weeks I wasn’t at work; when I was using my annual leave to traipse through Asia and South America.
The first time I went backpacking, five years ago, I had never really travelled alone: in the nights before leaving I lay in bed wide-eyed and apprehensive. But on my very first day, I landed in fuggy, foggy Bangkok and found myself tossed into a dorm of people, who insisted I go straight out onto the streets with them to celebrate Songkran – a festival where revellers spray water on one another to celebrate the Buddhist New Year. Being out among people I’d just met that day, drenched by complete strangers’ water pistols, somehow rinsed away my reservations.
I suppose that at home I had held onto the concept of what everyone knew me as growing up – a teenager, uncertain about who she was, unsure of how much space to take up – that I was never quite able to let go of. Here, I wasn’t in grey England, but steaming, sweltering Thailand: the air tasted different, tangy and iridescent, as though infused by the plastic-wrapped pineapple sold roadside, and it made me feel I could be different here too. Growing up, I’d confined myself to a limbs-folded, tucked-in version of myself. It felt safest to ensure everyone liked me. But travelling, I was never in a place for more than three days – if someone disliked me, I’d never see them again; the worst they could do was delete me as a Facebook friend. So I could risk extending, stretching myself out to my full height; being my most confident self.
But it was when I went backpacking in South America two years ago that I was convinced to be even more gutsy, and leave my conventional career in management consulting altogether. In Medellin, Colombia, I climbed onto the ski-lift style cable cars, gliding up to the communas
Pablo Escobar had once, to all intents and purposes, owned. I met fellow travellers who had quit prestigious, professional jobs long ago, either to volunteer here and do something meaningful with their lives, helping in the regeneration of the city – or just to teach salsa.
Some of them had been high-flying bankers and lawyers. But of course, they seemed far happier than I did now, for all my banal Linkedin commendations and my stable salary.
There is something about great heights and panoramic landscapes – especially the 380sq km of the Aburra Valley, over which the shanty houses of Medellin unfurl – that give extraordinary perspective and sharpen your senses intensely to the question, for the first time, of what life is actually about. I realise that might sound pretentious, so very “gap yah”, but I started to wonder whether the job I was doing was really “me” – spreadsheets and slide-shows were fine, but they hardly made my heart beat any quicker.
The gondola rose higher, above where shafts of sunlight cut across the mist, into verdant pine forests which formed a sort of green-carpeted heaven above the earthly city. The fairy-tale feeling made sense; Colombia was the home of magical realism, and made writing, which had until now been a surreal fantasy, seem far
more attainable. Would I forgive myself if I didn’t give it a go?
Intention is all very well, but I also needed a bit of mettle to make the move into journalism. So lucky for me that I realised travel is an aphrodisiac; you are so drunk on the sheer novelty of your surroundings that you take flights of fancy, leaps you might never attempt otherwise. In San Gil, the “adventure capital” of Colombia, I finally did my first ever bungee jump – 140m into a quarry, the biggest drop in South America. I’d never done anything like it in my life, but seeing the acres of cedar tree below me, with no one I knew to tell me it wasn’t a “Pravina” thing to do, I couldn’t overthink, and I simply stepped off the platform. Dangling upside down, legs upended and feet to the sky betrayed my every bodily instinct, made me want to just undo the buckle and fall to the floor altogether to finish it forever.
And yet, seconds later, I was finally hoisted up by the instructor, and finished it upright and alive.
I knew that if I could lean in and survive falling so far against my deepest fears, then I could surely leave my job and at least try and become a journalist. I needn’t pay so much heed to what anyone else told me I could do, all the reasons I shouldn’t: I had to just step off solid ground – and enjoy the freefall.