Rebel's Logic
Why do we quit?
How do we redeem ourselves and thrive after quitting?
Why we Quit
I have asked these questions while writing my book, One Day a Lion, forthcoming in 2026.
I have experienced both failure and redemption enough times to feel myself an expert, but the thriving continues to elude me. I do not feel alone here, however, as it appears I have plenty of company.
Semantics are important. So what does it mean, after all, to thrive? And, more importantly, what does it look like?
-- Money?
-- Fame?
-- Influence?
-- Happiness?
As a practicing attorney, I spent most of my time inside a courtroom, watching the judicial system where it served the people. Some lawyers dressed in three-piece suits, some in blazers and khakis. The attorneys in the three-piece suits, those who drove the Mercedes, the ones whose outward appearances indicated they were thriving, often practiced law in ways I would not.
As a cog in the corporate grinder, I spent most of my time compromising, negotiating, and problem-solving. My days passed in windowless boardrooms, watching PowerPoint slides, drinking stale coffee, and eating Dunkin’ Donuts. I frequently watched professionals rise through the ranks for reasons I failed to understand. Connections helped. Creating value helped. But ultimately, I failed to find the thing in me that most successful corporate risers found in themselves. Worse yet, I could not decipher what, exactly, that thing even was.
Like the successful executives I encountered, I worked hard. I created value. I took advantage of opportunities when presented. However, I frequently set myself ablaze so that others might stay warm. Meaning, I willingly did the jobs of three, frequently doing my boss’s job, too. And I watched those around me rise, sometimes meteorically, while my own progress proved meager in comparison.
And why? What’s the cause? And how many others feel the same?
Leverage and the Illusion of Fair Exchange
I have, thankfully, had the opportunity to consider these questions in depth for the past six months. And I have reached a conclusion. I wonder how many of you may find the conclusion useful when applying it to your own circumstances.
Personal life – and especially professional life – consists of leveraged relationships. One wants a thing that another can provide. It is challenging to think of any relationship that is not leveraged.
Football players have coaches who can help with recruiters. Judges and attorneys exchange justice for truth. In corporate life, your peers can facilitate or inhibit your upward mobility.
In marriage, partners control access to intimacy and emotional support. Parents teach and protect children, and the child’s life performance becomes the scorecard by which parental success is measured.
Exchanges in levered relationships are expected, acceptable, and reasonable for all involved – a system of controls in which we give and another takes, in which we take and another gives.
However, at times, the give and take can be levered in an unfair way. At such moments, we can accept the unfairness as a necessary hurdle, or we can refuse the leverage and break the system with our refusal to participate.
Society is arranged in such a way that accepting the leverage is considered winning, and refusing the leverage is losing. It must be so. If society celebrated quitters, then unnecessary refusals would proliferate across relationships, governments, and industries.
Therefore, acceptance of the leveraged relationship is a prerequisite for a functional system.
Society’s Punishment for Refusal
The quitter population will grow when the consequences of quitting become less painful than the leveraged arrangement. Each of us must measure the acceptability of the arrangement for ourselves, but regardless of our tolerance threshold, if we stay, we must either take too much or give too much. In either scenario, once the injustice is accepted, we must live by deception, manipulation, or obfuscation to protect ourselves from our own judgments. We accept the unjust leverage and suffer, being less than our true selves, or we reject it and become the rest of the story.
Acceptance stories are plentiful and are documented in success theater. But the rejection stories – what society labels failures, quitters, or losers – are found in true-crime thrillers or cautionary tales. We spend our lives avoiding being the subject of such stories, and many would-be quitters, understanding the fallout that follows quitting, refuse to quit. Not because quitting is wrong, but because quitting forever labels them in the eyes of others.
Not only is quitting a scarlet letter, but it is also something that must be explained. Society demands the quitter’s explanation for the failure before granting re-admission into society. Gaps on résumés must be explained. A consistency, even a foolish one, is required. Society will re-admit the quitter only if the arc of the quitter’s story bends toward an acceptance of socially permissible behavior.
The Rebel’s Logic
If the quitter’s story lacks an acceptance of societal norms, society labels those quitters as rebels. As the population of rebels grows within a society, it is an indicator of a society that leverages unjustly and frequently.
When I review my refusals, I think of the final desperate moments just before refusing. The time a judge put everyone on the docket in jail. The time my football coach said I would never play Division I football. The time I simply refused to participate in the corporate duplicity any longer.
None of my exits were forced. I chose to exit over the alternative. I do not regret the decisions, because each of my refusals followed an illumination of an illusion. A person’s natural reaction to such circumstances is rebellion.
When I look at society today, it appears that I am not the only quitter disillusioned with the system – likely an indicator that relationships are frequently leveraged unjustly.
If these words strike a chord, if you have ever refused to play your role, then stay with me. We’re building a rebel’s logic, one refusal at a time.
Part 2 of this post will be published next week. It will discuss how to find redemption and thrive after failure.
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