How To Quit Your Dream Job

How To!

Slate Magazine

Business, Education, How To, Self-improvement

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 9 September 2025

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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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. Do you have a problem that needs solving? Send us a note at [email protected] or leave us a voicemail at 646-495-4001 and we might have you on the show. Subscribe for free on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. 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. Get more of How To! with Slate Plus! Join for exclusive bonus episodes of How To! and ad-free listening on all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe from the How To! show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/howtoplus for access wherever you listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	There was literally a book in the 1980s in the U.S. called You Can Have It All.
0:05.0	And that's not true. 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 lives.
0:12.0	It sucks that you're not going to get to live all the lives. And I'm not going to pretend it doesn't suck. But you got to get comfortable with that amount of grief so that you can take care of
0:22.5	yourself elsewhere.
0:25.9	I'm Carval Wallace, and this is How To, the show where people ask us the question they can't
0:31.3	get off their mind, and we bring on an expert to help them work it out.
0:35.7	And more often than not, those people are at a kind of crossroads in life,
0:39.3	and today's listener is no exception.
0:43.0	I'm Alice. I work as a film programmer, but my work is really insecure,
0:48.5	but I can't seem to quit it, and it's really exhausting me.
0:52.5	All right, so let's get into that.
0:54.1	So what do you do as a film programmer?
0:57.0	All film festivals have programs.
1:00.0	Currently I work for actually a documentary conference,
1:03.0	so I put together a lot of talks for the documentary community.
1:08.0	And I also help curate the lineup for like a bigger international festival.
1:13.8	There's quite a few hats, all of which will my cup.
1:17.1	I'm also an associate producer working for a documentary production company.
1:21.0	I'm a film critic presenting on community radio.
1:23.8	I'm a board member of a local non-profit film festival, and I'm the captain of a
1:29.5	gender-inclusive Australian rules football local team as well. So there's, yeah, there's quite a few
1:36.2	hats. As a centophile, maybe this is just me, this sounds like a dream job. We have a local
	...

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