We’d been thriving in Seattle’s tech boom — Bianca, in the US on a work visa, was a senior finance reporter at Business Insider covering how Wall Street’s biggest firms use and invest in technology, and Charlie, a software engineer within Amazon’s payments organization, had spent eight years working toward a principal-engineer role.
We had what people like to call golden handcuffs: good salaries, rising careers, and a sense that if we just kept working hard, we’d likely keep making more money. The handcuffs weren’t all that tight, either; they were actually pretty comfortable.
But for us, quitting our jobs and taking time away from work was a…
