For years, Biswajit Mohanty lived the kind of life many people work hard to achieve that is degrees, a stable job and over a decade of corporate experience. But at 35, he made a decision that surprised many around him. He chose to walk away from corporate life completely.
Mohanty recently shared on Instagram that his last working day marked the end of an 11-year corporate career. Looking back, he realised his life had followed a fixed path from the very beginning. “So this is my last day in corporate,” he said. “I reflect back on the 12 years of schooling, 4 years of graduation, 2 years of post-graduation with an education loan, then 11 years of work experience.” Regardless of doing everything that was expected of him, he slowly began feeling disconnected from the work he was doing.
The questions that made him reconsider everything
Three years ago, Mohanty started asking himself difficult questions about his future. One question was that would he still do the same job if money was not a problem? The second question made him think even harder.
“What is the impact if this job ceased to exist in the real world?” he recalled asking himself. He said he could not find a strong connection between the work happening inside corporate offices and its impact outside in the real world. That realisation pushed him to rethink what he wanted from life.
Starting again outside the corporate world
Leaving a stable career was not easy. Mohanty spent the next three years trying to rebuild his life slowly. He said he had to “unlearn a lot of things” and spend time understanding what truly mattered to him. During this phase, he started teaching. In the beginning, things moved slowly and there were many failures. But over time, more students joined him and seeing their progress gave him confidence to continue.
“There’s still a lot of ambiguity,” he admitted. “There’s still a lot of learning.” Even so, he now feels ready to move ahead without the security of a corporate salary. Mohanty said the hardest part of the journey was not quitting his job, but accepting years earlier that he no longer wanted this life till retirement. “The scarier part was acknowledging it three years ago,” he said. Now, as he prepares to send his final goodbye mail, he says he feels calm rather than afraid.
“There’s an odd sense of satisfaction, calmness,” he shared. He also spoke about what he learned after years of chasing financial stability. “Without time and energy, the bank balance only gives convenience, not joy,” Mohanty said. “It does not give you that satisfaction to sleep well at night.”