When my family woke up last Thursday, we learned that our friend Arthur Simoneau was missing.

The day before, when the Palisades Fire was heading toward the neighborhood where I grew up and where he still lived, my mom had texted his ex-wife, Jill, to ask if she knew where he was—he’d stayed behind to defend our road from fire before. Jill thought he was out of town, at a hot spring. But the next morning, she called to tell us that he’d raced back to his house, and no one had heard from him since. She asked if my father and I could head out from our place nearby to look for him.

Author and her father driving through the canyons to their old house. The driveway entrance to author’s childhood home, where a sign her father made, “Bilberry Ln.” used to be. (Photograph by Brian Van Lau for The Atlantic) Author’s father with the lamp he once installed, next to what used to be their garage (Photograph by Brian Van Lau for The Atlantic)

My old neighborhood began because my Dad and Arthur, separately, looked at the hills above Malibu and thought, I should build a house up there. They each bought land in a stretch of Topanga Canyon so sparsely populated that the path from the main road to their parcels was unpaved, running through a hillside of sumac, sagebrush, and toyon that produced red berries in the winter. Each lot had a panoramic view of the ocean and coastline. City water and power did not quite reach our road, so throughout the late ’80s and early ’90s, Arthur and Dad made the spot habitable, jerry-rigging a well, generators, solar panels, and an unofficial connection to a neighbor’s utilities.

Arthur building his home (Courtesy of Jill Ajioka) Arthur’s house, with Andre’s Door to Nowhere on the right side of the second floor (Courtesy of Jill Ajioka)

Fires might have been more of a worry up in the hills, but settling there didn’t seem much riskier than building a house in earthquake-prone Southern California to begin with. Fire was a part of life, and they upheld the codes, putting in driveways large enough for a firetruck and regularly clearing the brush around their lots. In Topanga Canyon, a clique formed around Arson Watch, a volunteer organization whose members cruise around in logoed jackets, looking for signs of emerging fires.

When we went to search for Arthur last week, Dad took his Arson Watch jacket with him. We were both hoping this 25-year-old piece of nylon could get us through closed roads and into our old neighborhood. But the officers we met weren’t buying that my 78-year-old father, with his faded jacket, needed to pass by barricades to a still-smoldering area. We returned home hours later, worried and exhausted, and then an evacuation warning for our area came through on our phones. As we packed the car, Jill called again, to tell us that Arthur was dead.

Arthur’s trees after the fire (Photograph by Brian Van Lau for The Atlantic)

My first memory is of Arthur, and in it, he looks the same as he did when I saw him last month. We’re standing on my lawn at my third-birthday party, next to the rosebush that Mom was always trying to make happen but that the deer always ate. He asks me how old I am, and when I tell him, he staggers.“No way, dude!” he says, feigning disbelief. “You’re so old!” He’s in a T-shirt, a ponytail, and (as he always was, no matter how formal the occasion) flip-flops. Backpacking at 9,000 feet of elevation, chasing a bear away while camping—flip-flops, because they were easy to slip off and didn’t collect burs as easily as sneakers.

He and Jill spent years constructing their three-story brick rectangle, painted olive green, with fragrant pepper trees along the front walkway. Arthur wanted to build a house with his own two hands, as his grandfather had done. (A bonus: He could design the garage door to fit his car with his prized hang-gliding gear strapped to the roof.) A football field away, across a small canyon, Dad and a construction crew built what he’d thought would be his bachelor pad. After he met my mom, she went with him to Mexico to buy the tiles that she laid in the floors and walls.

Back then, the only other dwelling on our road was a geodesic dome about a half a mile away, occupied by a gay couple who drove a DeLorean and held a support group for gay Filipino men with custody issues. Later on, a germophobic epidemiologist took over the Dome House, as we called it, figuring its remote location would help him avoid contagion. Peculiarity was a neighborhood prerequisite. When Jill and Arthur saw people touring properties who they thought would make annoying neighbors, they would walk around outside naked to scare them off.

Scrapbook photographs of Arthur and Jill building their home, and the trailer they lived in during the years they were building (Courtesy of Jill Ajioka)

A fire came through the canyon in 1993, and Dad and Arthur stayed behind with utility hoses and nearly 20,000 gallons of water to extinguish spot fires that erupted around their newly finished houses. Somehow, everybody and their homes stayed intact, minus a few warped windows.

My parents had kids first, then Arthur and Jill had Andre, who became my first and best childhood friend. Eventually our road got paved, more families moved close by, and we had a neighborhood. We called it simply “the hill” to differentiate it from “town”—Malibu. Our parents would trade off taking us to school, past an abandoned fire truck incinerated in the ’93 fire. My parents helped raise Andre; Andre’s parents helped raise my brother and me. I only just learned that Dad and Arthur had cleared a path between our two homes so that Arthur could run a phone line from his house to ours. I’d always thought it was so Andre and I could get to each other’s houses faster.

Members of the neighborhood, gathered in Arthur’s backyard for Andre’s second birthday part. Jill is on the far left beside Andre (held by a neighbor); the author and her mother are on the far right. (Courtesy of Family of Arthur Simoneau)

Arthur was our neighborhood’s unofficial scoutmaster. We were free to be as weird as we wished, but he would nip any selfishness or malice in the bud with a stern “Not cool, dude.” He’d help us wriggle under the chain-link fence next to a No Trespassing sign so we could soak in hot springs in Ojai, and strap pillows around our behinds with duct tape to teach us to rollerblade. He turned a wild garter snake, then another, into pets, Snakey and Snakey 2, who would roam freely in the living room; he’d lecture us extensively on gun safety before showing us how to shoot .22s and stash our guns in the brush if we saw any sheriff’s helicopters. He let us believe we were running wild, keeping us safe the entire time. When I woke up the morning after my dad had a heart attack, having slept through the ambulance lights that brought Arthur to our house, I wondered not about what might be wrong, but about what adventure he would take us on that day.

Our houses never really got finished. My brother’s bedroom was intended to be a walk-in closet, mine a breakfast nook, and neither had doors. Andre’s bedroom, meanwhile, had a surplus: a Door to Nowhere overlooking the driveway. Arthur had always meant to build a staircase there. The land, too, would allow us only so much normalcy. When my parents got us a trampoline, the Santa Ana winds blew it down the hillside, where it landed at a 45-degree angle against a tree and began its second life as our slide. We went through fires, blackouts, mudslides, rockslides, and windstorms. But we had the sense that tolerating these dangers made this life possible—one where you could see the Pacific Ocean from the kitchen and, from your bedroom at night, watch coyotes trot across the yard, backlit by the glow of Los Angeles. My family moved away when I started high school, only because we had to downsize, and other families left too. Eventually, Arthur was the only person from those years who still lived on the road.

Arthur looking out his window at the clouds above the Pacific Ocean. He could be found in this spot frequently, reading. (Courtesy of Jill Ajioka)

Before my father and I tried to reach the old road, we called the man who had bought our house on the hill. He told us what we didn’t want to hear: It had burned down. He thanked my father for building such a lovely home. Dad immediately thought of the nautilus fossil he’d placed in the center of the fireplace, made of rocks he’d collected along the canyon to the house. He wondered out loud if it had survived. On Monday, we finally did make it through the charred canyon, past deflated cacti, and up to the hills. We’d point to the piles of debris: I can’t tell if that used to be so-and-so’s house. When we saw the hills with nothing on them, I tried to superimpose what I knew of the land on what I saw, and I couldn’t. The sumac, sagebrush, and toyon were pulverized. We were on a new, blackened planet that happened to have the same topography as the place where I was raised.

Arthur’s home (foreground) and the rest of the neighborhood, burned. The rubble of the author’s house can be seen, flattened, on the far left. (Photograph by Brian Van Lau for The Atlantic)

Standing in what I think used to be our living room, I could not tell if a crumbling piece of metal was a washing machine or the 1920s Roper stove that we’d sold with the house. But I did find the nautilus, resting on top of some of the rocks Dad had collected. I thought about Arthur: He would have known how long it would take for the sumac to grow back.

So many people here are staring down losses like these. At least 10 of my friends’ childhood homes burned. If I drive down the coast right now, I can see hundreds of flattened houses where people I’ve never met were raised. All around Los Angeles, histories are vanishing. When we first found out that Arthur was missing, the fires’ official death count included just a few people; it has since risen to 25.

Dad and I drove away, and as we turned on a road where Arthur would lead us on bicycle rides, Dad gently mentioned that we’d found only one nautilus. He had actually placed two in the fireplace, and the one he loved the most was still missing. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten. Yes, there were two.

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.

“My job is a Kafkaesque nightmare,” a young friend told me. I understood him to  be referring to Franz Kafka’s famous 1915 surrealist novella, The Metamorphosis, in which the protagonist, Gregor Samsa, is trapped in a life as a traveling salesman that he finds monotonous and meaningless. “Day in, day out—on the road,” Gregor reflects. “I’ve got the torture of traveling, worrying about changing trains, eating miserable food at all hours, constantly seeing new faces, no relationships that last or get more intimate.” His life seems no more significant than that of, well, maybe a cockroach that mindlessly scurries from place to place and ultimately dies in complete obscurity. And this is where the author’s surreal genius enters: Gregor actually turns into a giant bug (often rendered in pictorial adaptations as a cockroach).

I assumed that my friend was making a figurative comparison—and didn’t think I needed to check whether he had met Gregor’s fate. Instead, I judged that he needed to change his situation and offered some social-science-based advice on the best way to hit the job market. Perhaps you in your working life can relate to my friend’s feeling of alienation and helplessness. Or perhaps you would simply like to be earning more. Either way, you are not alone: At any given time, a substantial proportion of American workers are looking for a better job.

Even so, you may be hesitant to take the leap, in an uncertain economic environment, out of doubt about whether a change will make things better or worse. So let me share the advice I gave my friend, as a way to help you structure the search for a job that suits you better by understanding your fears and facing them logically.

[From the July/August 2024 issue: Stop trying to understand Kafka]

For most people, changing jobs is a significant cause of stress. According to a study that used the Holmes-Rahe Life Stress Inventory standard assessment tool, altering your employment creates on average about a third as much stress as the death of a spouse, half as much as divorce, about the same amount as the death of a close friend, and 50 percent more than quitting smoking. No surprise, then, that normal people with steady jobs are reluctant to quit them, even when their work-life experience is not great.

People resist big life changes, such as finding a new job, partly for biological reasons. For example, the brain is more efficient, using less energy, when it can rely on consolidated memory—when it does not have to process too much new information. One neuroscientific hypothesis is that this explains why some people are dogmatic and closed-minded; it also explains people’s resistance to novelty—why they can be reluctant to learn new job skills, meet a group of new colleagues, figure out how to stay on the right side of a new boss, and work out a faster new commute.

Psychologists have studied the characteristics of people who are most reluctant to quit. As expected, they found that this applies to those who have risk-averse personalities. In a 2015 study of German IT employees, for example, researchers showed that even when the employees had an equally high intention to quit their job, those resistant to change were about a third as likely to jump, compared with those open to change.

My late father belonged to this resistant category. I remember him looking once at employment listings for his profession and saying, “I would love to apply for one of these jobs.” “Why don’t you?” I asked. He looked at me as if I were insane to even suggest such a thing. But my dad had another characteristic, which explains his reluctance to change jobs even better: high conscientiousness. Psychologists in 2016 theorized that people high in this positive personality trait may be especially reluctant to be seen as job hoppers and are more likely to make the best of the position they have.

Given such resistance, what people really want to know is whether a job change, with all the disruption and uncertainty, is likely to lead to greater happiness. The answer is probably. Obviously, a final determination depends on how miserable you are in the old gig and the quality of the new one. But as I have written in a previous column, according to one study, job changers typically rated their satisfaction with the position they’re leaving at 4.5 on a 1 to 7 scale. The new job earned a 6 during the first six weeks, but that tended to decay over the next six months to about 5.5. Still, a long-term net gain of one satisfaction point is nothing to sneeze at.

Much more interesting to the Gregor Samsas in the workforce is what happens if you don’t quit your job. Although you can probably count on not turning into a cockroach, chronically low job satisfaction has been shown in research to provoke mental-health problems. In a 2019 study of Japanese civil servants, psychologists looked at the effects on workers’ mood a year after they reported job dissatisfaction. They found that job dissatisfaction was significantly related to depression at the one-year follow-up.

Not surprisingly, the quality of one’s work suffers as well. Researchers studying “off-the-job embeddedness”—when a person stays in a particular employment because of such extrinsic factors as convenience for a child’s school or a home-purchase location—found in 2017 that this behavior lowers job performance and commitment, and increases absenteeism.

[Rogé Karma: The California job-killer that wasn’t]

If the American labor market were in recession, any worries you might have about quitting could be well justified. In present conditions, however, you might want to find a way to deal with your anxiety and take the plunge. The best way to do this is by starting with the recognition that worrying is a form of unfocused fear. To make good decisions in an uncertain situation with less anxiety, you need to focus your attention on exactly why you are unhappy and on exactly what you want instead. This way, the whole job-switching process is less amorphous and frightening.

A helpful guide for doing so comes from my Harvard colleague Ethan Bernstein and his co-authors Michael B. Horn and Bob Moesta. Their new book, Job Moves, documents the experiences of hundreds of job changers, and finds that their switches are motivated largely by one of four “quests.” Your principal job dissatisfaction probably falls under their schema—just as one of their quests may fit how you should assess a new opportunity.

Quest 1: Get out.
Your job feels like a dead end, and your future looks very cockroach-like as a result. This may be because you see no room for advancement or change, and that may include a boss who makes progress impossible. The aim here is to look for a new job in which you believe you can be both supported and challenged. Make a point of asking about that opportunity when you are interviewed for a position.

Quest 2: Regain control.
Here, the problem is that you don’t have any say in the way you work. The zoological metaphor is less cockroach, more hamster. Generally, this indicates a rigid company culture or a controlling boss. The goal in your employment search is to find a new spot that will allow you more of a voice in how, when, and where you work.

Quest 3: Regain alignment.
Your dissatisfaction may instead stem from being misunderstood, disrespected, or undervalued. This almost always reflects a management problem and is extremely common. According to the Harvard Business Review, 54 percent of American workers report that they don’t get enough respect from their boss. The way to find a better match is not just to assess your potential manager in an interview, but also talk with employees of the organization. When you do so, be sure to ask specifically about whether the institution fosters a culture of respect and recognition.

Quest 4: Take the next step.
In this case, your job dissatisfaction is not your employer’s fault; you have simply outgrown your old job or career path. This realization tends to occur when you hit a life milestone, such as turning 50 or when your kids leave home. The telltale sign here is low-level boredom with the status quo. Diagnosing this requires some discernment: You will need to listen carefully to your gut feeling to figure out some different options.

[Arthur C. Brooks: The secret to happiness at work]

The authors of Job Moves urge their readers to keep one especially important point in mind as they change employment: Look for improvement, not perfection. When you are feeling stuck in life, it is easy to see a job change as a panacea for all of your troubles. Of course, things are rarely as simple as that. As we saw earlier, the realistic scenario is that, over the first year of a job move, you will go from a 4.5 to a 5.5, not all the way to a 7, on the satisfaction scale. A new job won’t fix your marriage or help me grow hair. And you should probably expect to find some things you like less in a new position—a better job can be a more demanding one, for instance.

When you think about it, finding a new job that is perfect in every way would actually be rather surreal. Like turning into a roach.