The email I sent to my manager was exactly three sentences long. After eight years, 47 performance reviews, and one near-burnout that I'd convinced myself was just "being dedicated," I typed the words that would change everything: "I've decided to resign. My last day will be March 15th. Thank you for the opportunities."
I didn't mention that I'd already bought 12 acres of land in rural Vermont. Or that I'd spent the past six months watching YouTube videos about timber framing. Or that my therapist had gently suggested I might be using the idea of building a cabin as a way to avoid dealing with a deeper existential crisis.
She was probably right. I built the cabin anyway.
The Breaking Point
Here's the thing about working at a company like Google: it's designed to be comfortable. Free food, on-site massage, shuttle buses with WiFi, a salary that makes your college friends' eyes go wide at reunions. The golden handcuffs are real, and they're lined with organic snacks and equity vesting schedules.
I was a senior product manager on the Maps team. I'd helped ship features that millions of people use every day. I had a team I genuinely liked, a manager who advocated for me, and a clear path to director if I wanted it. By every external measure, I had won.
"The opposite of depression isn't happiness. It's vitality. And vitality had been slowly draining from my life like a battery with a short circuit." — From my journal, January 2024
The breaking point came during a quarterly planning meeting. We were debating whether a button should be blue or green. Not metaphorically—literally. A $3 trillion company was paying a room full of very smart people very good money to spend two hours discussing button colors. I remember looking around the table and thinking: Is this all there is?
That night, I pulled up Zillow and searched for land in Vermont. I'd never been to Vermont. I just knew it was the opposite of everything I'd known—far from tech hubs, covered in trees, cold enough to require real physical effort to survive. Within a week, I'd made an offer.
What Nobody Tells You About "Following Your Dream"
The self-help industrial complex has sold us a sanitized version of life changes. Follow your passion. Take the leap. The net will appear. What they don't mention is that sometimes the net doesn't appear, and you fall into a pile of mud and sawdust while questioning every decision you've ever made.
The first three months were brutal. I didn't know how to read a blueprint. I'd never operated a chainsaw. The nearest hardware store was 45 minutes away, and I made that drive at least twice a day because I kept forgetting things—or buying the wrong things—or breaking things.
Here's a partial list of my failures:
- Cut a support beam 6 inches too short (had to order new lumber, two-week delay)
- Installed three windows backwards
- Accidentally mixed up the hot and cold water lines
- Fell off a ladder and bruised two ribs
- Cried in my car in the Tractor Supply parking lot at least four separate times
But here's the thing: each failure taught me something real. Not the abstract "learnings" from a post-mortem document—actual, physical knowledge that lived in my hands and my body. When you mess up a dovetail joint, you understand wood grain in a way no YouTube video can teach. When you spend a week troubleshooting a drainage issue, you develop a relationship with the land itself.
For the first time in a decade, I was learning by doing—not by watching slides in a conference room.
The Real Reason I Left
Here's what I couldn't admit, even to myself, for a long time: I wasn't burned out on work. I was burned out on abstraction.
In tech, we spend our days manipulating symbols. We write documents about documents. We have meetings to prepare for meetings. We measure success in metrics that are themselves proxies for other metrics. Everything is once, twice, three times removed from the physical world.
When I started building the cabin, I rediscovered a fundamental human pleasure: making things with your hands that exist in the real world. When I finish a wall, it's there. I can touch it. It keeps out the rain. There's no A/B test, no stakeholder review, no "alignment meeting" required. The wall either stands or it doesn't.
This isn't an argument that everyone should quit their tech job and become a carpenter. Most people find meaning in knowledge work, and that's valid. But I think we've collectively lost touch with the satisfaction of physical creation, and that loss has consequences we're only beginning to understand.
What I Actually Learned
Fourteen months in, the cabin is finished. It's 640 square feet of hand-built space with a sleeping loft, a wood stove, and windows that frame the Green Mountains like paintings. I write these words from a desk I made myself, looking out at trees I've come to know individually.
Here's what I wish I'd known before I started:
1. Competence is transferable, but not in the ways you expect
My product management skills were useless for understanding load-bearing walls. But the meta-skill of learning complex new domains? That transferred perfectly. The ability to break down overwhelming projects into manageable pieces? Essential. The comfort with ambiguity and iteration? Invaluable.
2. Identity is stickier than you think
For months, when people asked what I did, I'd say "I used to work at Google." I was defining myself by what I had left, not what I was building. The shift from "former tech worker" to "person who builds things" took almost as long as the cabin itself.
3. Privilege enabled this, full stop
I need to be clear: I could do this because I'd saved money during my tech years, because I have no dependents, because I had a safety net. This essay is not a prescription. It's a data point.
4. The "dream job" is a scam
No job will save you. No career path leads to permanent satisfaction. The question isn't "What's my dream job?" but "What kind of life do I want to live, and how can work fit into that life?"
What's Next
I'm not going back to Big Tech. But I'm also not staying in Vermont forever—at least not full-time. I've started consulting for early-stage startups, working 15-20 hours a week from the cabin. The rest of my time goes to writing, woodworking, and learning to grow vegetables with wildly inconsistent success.
The cabin taught me that I don't need to choose between "successful career person" and "person who makes things." I can be both. I can be neither. I can be something else entirely that doesn't have a LinkedIn category.
If you're reading this and feeling that pull—that sense that something is off, that the path you're on isn't quite yours—I'm not going to tell you to quit your job tomorrow. But I will say this: pay attention to that feeling. It's trying to tell you something.
The cabin exists because I listened.
Responses
147 commentsDavid Park
2 days ago
This hit hard. I'm a Staff Engineer at Meta, 12 years in. Spent last week in meetings about meeting about the reorg. Your line about "manipulating symbols" is going to haunt me. In a good way, I think.
Sarah Mitchell
1 day ago
Thank you for the honesty about privilege. So many of these "I quit my job" essays skip that part. Curious - do you think you could have found this satisfaction through a hobby, or did it need to be the full immersion?
James Wright
18 hours ago
I left Amazon 3 years ago to start a pottery studio. Different medium, same journey. The part about identity being sticky - absolutely true. Took me two years to stop introducing myself as "ex-Amazon."