How To Quit Your Dream Job
How To! with Mike Pesca
Peach Fish Projects
4.3 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 9 September 2025
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Alice has an objectively cool job. She programs film festivals and gets to watch documentaries for a living. But that living is also stressful: It's low-paying, seasonal work that provides some status, sure, but not much stability. On this episode of How To!, Carvell Wallace brings on atheist chaplain and author Vanessa Zoltan, who spent two years helping countless people decide whether to quit (or not) on her podcast The Real Question. Vanessa shares what she learned from those conversations—and helps Alice figure out how to reimagine her life (with job security).
If you liked this episode check out How To Switch Careers in Midlife, How To Take a Sabbatical, and How To Know When to Quit Your Job.
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The show is produced by Rosemary Belson, with Kevin Bendis and Sophie Summergrad. Our technical director is Merritt Jacob and our supervising producer is Joel Meyer.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi everyone, I'm Susie Weiss, and I've noticed there's just simply not enough podcasts in the world. So I'm launching my own. Let's go. Let's go, baby. Second Thought is a weekly show about pop culture. The stuff everyone's been binging, arguing about, obsessing over. Here's the thing about heated rivalry. I mean, even the most devoted swifties, I think we can agree, not our best work. We'll be hosting thoughtful conversations with culture's most important figures. Talk about genius. |
| 0:22.6 | Talk about generational talent. |
| 0:23.7 | Coming to headphones near you on |
| 0:25.0 | April 17th with a first guess you won't want to miss. Available wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:30.7 | There was literally a book in the 1980s in the U.S. called You Can Have It All. And that's not true. |
| 0:36.5 | We're going to die one day, which means you only get to live one life, which means you don't get to live all the U.S. called You Can Have It All. And that's not true. We're going to die one day, which means you |
| 0:38.3 | only get to live one life, which means you don't get to live all the lives. It sucks that you're |
| 0:43.4 | not going to get to live all the lives. And I'm not going to pretend it doesn't suck. But you got to |
| 0:49.1 | get comfortable with that amount of grief so that you can take care of yourself elsewhere. |
| 0:56.0 | I'm Carvel Wallace. and this is How Too, the show where people ask us the question they can't get |
| 1:01.5 | off their mind, and we bring on an expert to help them work it out. And more often than not, |
| 1:06.8 | those people are at a kind of crossroads in life, and today's listener is no exception. |
| 1:13.1 | I'm Alice. I work as a film programmer, but my work is really insecure, but I can't seem to quit it, |
| 1:20.4 | and it's really exhausting me. All right, so let's get into that. So what do you do as a film programmer? |
| 1:27.1 | All film festivals have programs. |
| 1:30.3 | Currently, I work for actually a documentary conference, so I put together a lot of talks for |
| 1:36.0 | the documentary community. And I also help curate the lineup for like a bigger international |
| 1:42.6 | festival. There's quite a few hats, all of which for my cup. |
| 1:47.1 | I'm also an associate producer working for a documentary production company. |
| 1:51.0 | I'm a film critic presenting on community radio. |
| 1:54.0 | I'm a board member of a local non-profit film festival. |
| 1:57.8 | And I'm the captain of a gender inclusive Australian rules football local team |
... |
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