Pushkin.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought lots of odd new expressions and concepts into the public consciousness.
Things like social distancing, variant of concern, flattening the curve, fomites.
But the new post-COVID concept I want to focus on today is one that I find especially interesting from the perspective of thinking about our negative emotions.
That concept is the great resignation.
It's a term coined by Anthony Klotz, an expert in organizational behavior at Texas A&M University.
He used the term to describe the massive and historically unprecedented number of people who've decided to quit their jobs just over the last few years.
Economists have been puzzled by many aspects of this resignation trend.
especially when you take into account which workers seem to be bailing on their jobs in record numbers.
Because research shows the massive exodus we're seeing isn't just caused by low-paid workers seeking a higher living wage,
or employees in their 20s seeking something new in a wide-open job market.
The great resignation seems to be driven instead by highly skilled and often well-paid mid-career workers,
people in their late 30s and 40s.
They're the ones statistically speaking who seem to be ditching their jobs and droves.
But as a psychologist,
I'm more interested in the emotional states that are driving so many people to just up and quit a career that many of them have had for over a decade.
And if we look at the reason why, it's because a lot of us are just not feeling okay at work.
And I really mean us, as in me too.
As a busy professor, researcher, head of college speaker and podcaster,
I definitely know what it's like to feel physically and emotionally overwhelmed at the end of the week.