Leo Tolstoy should have been triumphant. By the 1880s, the Russian novelist had written the masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina, achieving what he’d spent his life pursuing.
But he was consumed with despair.
On paper, Tolstoy embodied success in every dimension of nineteenth-century Russian life. He was a literary genius. He was a privileged aristocrat. And he was a father and husband, with a marriage that would last nearly five decades and yield thirteen children. Yet these distinctions only intensified his anxiety as he questioned what they meant—and if he even wanted them anymore. He was increasingly uncertain about who he was, and worse: whether he wanted to keep being that way.
In 1882, in his fifties, Tolstoy finished writing A Confession—a raw exploration of his looming crisis. “I felt that what I had been standing on had collapsed,” he wrote. “What I had lived on no longer existed, and there was nothing left.”
The questions tormented him. Who was the real Tolstoy? And more urgently, could he change?
More than a century later, in a different country and a completely different life, those same questions would surface again—not in the mind of a Russian novelist at the height of his career, but in a fledgling actress deciding whether she wanted to continue to be one at all. Peyton McDavitt knew her move to Hollywood was a gamble, aimed at making up for lost time. She’d loved acting as a kid, performing in school plays and regional theater. But as she grew older, acting felt like an all-or-nothing proposition whose pursuit required abandoning everything else she cared about: school, sports, music. So she’d let it go.
Rigid identities mean that who and what we’ve been keeps us from becoming anyone or anything else.
But acting was still her dream job. And finally, at twenty-three, she was ready to commit to it the way she committed to anything she did: completely. “I knew I was going to regret not knowing what might happen if I didn’t try,” she told me. “I had to go find out.”
The same work ethic that had made her a top student and an All-American athlete would fuel her acting career. At least, that was the plan.
It wasn’t easy. Out in Hollywood, she waited tables at trendy restaurants, serving her friends and fellow actors who had already broken through. She babysat. She tutored. She took a gig driving an industry executive’s kid to school.
That was fine; she loved the hustle. She loved the challenge of cobbling together her small jobs into a sustainable career. And she loved the craft itself. Each audition was a puzzle to solve, each role a chance to disappear into someone else’s mind. She wasn’t chasing money or fame. This was just how she wanted to spend her days.
Finally, on the cusp of thirty, she realized she had made it. She was booking regular acting work, enough to quit her day jobs, and was living out the dream she’d come to Hollywood to pursue.
But something was wrong. As time went on, auditions became mechanical. Getting rejected felt like nothing, or even relief. Sometimes even the victory of landing a role felt hollow. While driving to callbacks, she’d find herself fantasizing about other careers, other versions of herself and who she could be.
It was unsettling. Acting had become exactly what she’d wanted it to be: her identity, her source of income, and the foundation of her social life.
And just as with Tolstoy, that was the problem. Doubt crept in.
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Of course, claiming an identity can be something we do deliberately. Tolstoy had devoted his life to creating world-defining literature; he was a novelist. As McDavitt sought to build a life around her chosen craft, at a certain point, she wasn’t just acting anymore. She was an actress.
Sometimes you’re just associated with your job, whether you like it or not. I’m in marketing. I tutor. I’m in sales. Your boyfriend’s family wants to know what you do and even though it’s mostly how you afford your rent, when you answer, you know they’ve ascribed this thing you get paid for as core to how they view you overall. So we come to see ourselves this way, too. We become an actress or a soccer player or an existential Russian novelist partly as a way of communicating who we are to the rest of the world. The labels also help us understand ourselves.
These dynamics aren’t new. Since at least the Middle Ages, jobs in many European cultures have defined our public and personal identities, to the point where they became our very names. The most common last name in Germany and Switzerland is Müller, meaning “miller,” or a person who grinds grain. In the UK, it’s Smith—someone who makes things from metal. Russia has thousands of Kuznetsovs (from “smith”). When she became an actress, McDavitt changed her name as well—a symbolic shift that showed how completely she had merged with her goal and transformed herself for it.
When these were medieval jobs we inherited or were assigned, quitting meant breaking out of roles that were imposed on us. Today, it’s different. We expect our careers to intersect with our calling, to reflect what we want to get out of life. Claiming our identity as a nurse, a lawyer, a painter is the reward for our hard work. Our nouns are a prize we earn.
That means it’s easy to get caught in an identity trap, where we create rigid identities instead of flexible ones. Whether in school, or at work, or elsewhere in our steady march through life, we check the boxes laid out for us and eventually hit some milestone that serves as an inflection point. We become who we are—and are meant to stay that way. Psychologists have a phrase for this experience: “identity foreclosure.”
Even when we want to change, we’re held back, if only to avoid confronting the question of who we’ll be once what we do has ended. Rigid identities mean that who and what we’ve been keeps us from becoming anyone or anything else.
These self-definitions are often quite narrow. From the time we’re students, we’re told to specialize, to pick one path. Select one major. Get one job. Build one career. Dabbling gets ridiculed; consistency, rewarded. Resist committing to a path and you’re a dilettante, a waffler. And if you leave the path you’ve chosen? Then you’ve claimed the worst identity of all: you’re a quitter.
Success gets measured by forever. A successful career builds steadily until retirement. A successful marriage lasts until death. A successful person makes decisions and sticks to them.
Our identity defines us. Then it confines us. Once those questions of who we are are settled, we’re disincentivized from revisiting them.
Technology reinforces these rigid identities. On the internet, our words outlast our views. Anyone can take our photo and keep it on their phone—a permanent record of our potentially unintentional presentation to the world. Those who follow us online expect consistency, not nuance or experimentation, let alone a pivot to something new. Even deleting doesn’t make the digital remnants of who we’ve been disappear. It’s all still there, somewhere. We may have reincarnated, but the ghosts of our former selves linger on.
It can make every decision feel impossibly heavy, especially in our early years, as we second-guess if we truly want to commit. “One of the terrifying aspects of the twenties is the inner conviction that the choices we make are irrevocable,” wrote Gail Sheehy in her classic book Passages. “If we choose a graduate school or join a firm, get married or don’t marry, move to the suburbs or forego travel abroad, decide against children or against a career, we fear in our marrow that we might have to live with that choice forever.”
Our identity defines us. Then it confines us. Once those questions of who we are are settled, we’re disincentivized from revisiting them. So what if we want to change? We can’t.
Circling back to Peyton McDavitt, acting had become her identity. When people asked what she did, she answered in terms of what she was: “I’m an actress.” That was a sign of victory—the reward for earning the dream job she spent years trying to achieve. Finally, she had turned her verbs into nouns.
“It was such a precious thing,” she told me. “I loved it. I could do it. I was satisfied.”
But as she grew older, her idea of a dream job changed. There were structural problems. Acting may have been a career, but it was made up of individual jobs, which increasingly failed to support the lifestyle she wanted as she got older. The schedule was unpredictable; managing her finances became exhausting. She realized her personal goals and her career goals were no longer aligned. As she entered her thirties, she started to worry: “Am I ever going to be able to buy a house doing this, or even make enough cash to save?”
Even the work itself felt different. She shot a show in Hawaii that got canceled abruptly; it was like whiplash, from success to starting over. Meanwhile, she watched a friend book his second part ever, and then catapult into stardom. That kind of randomness used to be exciting; now, it was maddening. One day she was en route to an audition and had a moment of clarity. She was traveling hours to try out for a role as Hooker Vampire #4. She didn’t even want to be Hooker Vampire #1. Yes, she could keep pushing to become more successful, to make more money, to become more established in her field. But she had already achieved a version of this—enough to guess what the path ahead might look like if she did achieve those things. But did she even still want them? Would more make her happy? What was she doing this for?
“To continue seemed like the definition of insanity,” she said. “It just wasn’t working anymore.”
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Excerpted from The Case for Quitting: The Surprising Benefits of Opting Out by Lindsay Crouse. Copyright © 2026 by Lindsay Crouse. Reprinted by permission of HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
