In part because of pressures like these, nearly 2.5 million women have left the workforce since the pandemic began. About a third of mothers are considering “downshifting” their careers or pulling out of the workforce, according to research from the consulting firm McKinsey. This is the first time in six years that the consultancy has found women expressing such a strong interest in working less. “They were feeling a lot more burned out; they were feeling like they have extra responsibilities outside of the workplace, and not having flexibility at work,” Jess Huang, an author of the McKinsey report, told me. This downshifting is barely perceptible in national data: The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a slight increase in part-time work since the pandemic started, but that is among workers doing so for economic reasons, because they couldn’t find full-time work. Lower-income people have fewer choices than rich people—they might be working a part-time job because that’s all that’s available, or because they can’t afford child care for longer, or because more hours would have meant more exposure to COVID-19. But some women have been so worn down by the competing stressors of the pandemic that they welcome the shift to fewer paid working hours. Over the past several weeks, I’ve talked with half a dozen professional women who have left their full-time jobs, are now working less than full time, and are happier as a result. The women I interviewed are immensely lucky. Most of them have a partner who also brings in income. Most of them made enough at their previous jobs to allow for a brief, low-speed detour. Most of them work in fields in which freelancing or part-time contract work is an option. High-paid office workers, the types of people I interviewed, are “making choices around work based on their level of sanity, or level of insanity, that they’re willing to put up with,” says Misty Heggeness, a research economist at the U.S. Census Bureau who focuses on families. The level of insanity, never particularly low, has now become more than many can withstand.