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The Big ReadMonday, 09.07.2026View in App

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Get the whole story. Join now.I Was a Workaholic. Quitting Changed My Life.

Lindsay Crouse was a Harvard-educated, Emmy-winning ‘New York Times’ journalist who ran marathons in her spare time. The hardest thing she ever did? Quit.

“Quitting is not simply a failure of resolve or easy way out,” Lindsay Crouse writes. “Often, it’s the courageous first step to something better.” (Richard Baker/In Pictures Ltd./Corbis via Getty Images)

By Lindsay CrousePREVIEW

Americans are stressed about work. For some, it’s because the machines might be coming for their jobs. For others, 40 years of the 9-to-5 with a gold watch at the end seems like a quaint fantasy from a bygone era. When anyone can strike it rich as an influencer or prediction markets bettor, is the grind even worth it?

It’s Labor Day, and work is on our minds. How do we make our work meaningful? And how much is too much? The Front Page will be back tomorrow, but today we’re publishing an essay by reformed workaholic Lindsay Crouse. She once gave up nights and weekends writing for The New York Times about how perseverance makes successful people—until she “started to recognize another, darker trend in this relentless compulsion to stay and strive.” In an excerpt of her new book, The Case for Quitting: The Surprising Benefits of Opting Out, she argues for a new way of thinking that all of us would do well to consider—workaholics, slackers, and everyone in between. “Quitting is not simply a failure of resolve or easy way out,” she writes. “Often, it’s the courageous first step to something better.” —The Editors

For a long time, I was an eager disciple of the grind. One night, I hit a dead end.

I was pregnant and exhausted. I had just run a marathon, because I’d registered and paid and I don’t quit, but I hadn’t trained enough and days later, my legs still felt like stilts. It was midnight, Thanksgiving weekend, and I was still working.

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I was nearly 40, and yet I related to how students at pressure-­cooker universities sometimes describe themselves: like ducks, gliding along on the surface while my legs churned furiously below. It wasn’t that I was failing, at least not if you asked the internet. I had a good job at The New York Times, and raced marathons on the weekends, for fun.