Michael Well, nobody saw that coming: in October 2022 I decided to quit my job at Apple. Admittedly, the salary was astronomical, but the work was no longer fun for me, and I had hardly any time left for my always numerous bubbling ideas and private projects. So it was time for a reorientation.
How does that actually work, to resign from an American company, and what are the consequences? Of course, I had to think about all of this months in advance, after all, in America you are heavily dependent on your employer: They not only pay the lion's share of the exorbitantly expensive health insurance, but often also the bill for the mobile phone and are therefore the owner of the mobile number. Often the phone itself and the laptop belong to the company, and both have to be returned when leaving.
Especially critical is the health insurance, because it is strongly tied to the employer in the US. If you don't work anymore, you don't have health insurance either. That's obviously crazy, because there is no public health insurance in America that everyone can fall back on in the worst case scenario. So you are actually uninsured, and if you get sick, you have to pay everything out of your own pocket, which has already driven many people into ruin.