Quitting With Nothing Lined Up
I'm a second year analyst at top 3 BB, feeling incredibly burned out. The workload isn't even bad at the moment, I'm pushing back on everything and have generally stopped caring, but I am really hating the job and can never switch off even when it's quiet. I'm finding it difficult to motivate myself to do anything and have lost all interest in any of the projects that would have excited me 18 months ago. My personal life is suffering after completely neglecting friends & family because of the demands of the job and my mental health has taken a big hit.
I know that IB isn't for me and that I also don't want to go down the PE route. Other than that, I don't know where I see myself - maybe growth equity, corp dev or even joining a start up, but at the moment nothing is really exciting me.
I've seriously been considering quitting after bonuses this summer with nothing else lined up and taking a few months off. I don't feel like I'm at breaking point so I think I could stay in the job until August. The idea was that I could then use this time to get my life back together a bit, figure out what truly interests me and what I want my next career move to be, and also just take some time to finally relax, travel etc. I have savings I could live off for this time.
Is this a terrible idea? I feel like I should be able to use the next few months until bonuses to prep & apply for jobs, like every other AN2 is/has been doing, then quit with an offer in hand. I technically have the time to do this but honestly I feel way too burned out and mentally exhausted to even think about it. I'm quite worried that prep will be a lot harder without access to deal folders, template models, Bloomberg and so on, so I'll be putting myself at a big disadvantage when I do start recruiting. And given the current environment, I'm wondering whether a stable, well-paying job isn't such a bad thing at the moment, and maybe I should keep the job but try to coast as much as possible while figuring things out.
This is partly me rambling to get things off my chest but also would hugely appreciate any advice. All opinions are more than welcome as I'm feeling quite lost at the moment.
Sounds like a good time to go to business school to me. Haha.
I find utterly tragic that a) people on this forum believe there are only 5 career paths and b) that they dont realise IB/PE/HF/CorpDev/StartUp are all the same shitty paper pushing nonsense.