These are real thoughts that probably cycle through my head every three to seven hours. For most of my adult life I've assumed everyone had the same tendency to fantasize about different ways to quit your job. And judging by a brief survey of my friends, I'm mostly right. (Journalists, it turns out, have particularly deep imaginations when it comes to career suicide.)

After I graduated I went back to Newfoundland, started working at The Telegram as a daily reporter, and that was a totally different game. I was the bottom of the food chain, working in an old boys' locker room environment. I was working swing shifts—two weeks of days, two weeks of nights. I handled all the "somebody has to do this" assignments, like go to this unveiling of the new police horse.

My chosen career was working as a journalist. I started in student press which was a lot of fun. At Carleton I remember racing Jack Layton on my bike, showing up at the press gallery in crazy clothes—no boss to speak of, just me.

To find out, I compiled the stories of folks who say they successfully 100 percent escaped the so-called rat race. Feel free to plan your own extrication from the shackles of capitalism accordingly. (Disclaimer: If any of these push you to actually quit your job, please do not @ me when shit doesn't work out.)

Granted, not everyone works at a desk during daylight hours, and "rat race" can mean different things to different people. But given my own obsession with fleeing a competitive field, I wanted to know which non-competitive, cubicle-free alternatives actually work for people. Does goat farming really feel like an escape from capitalism? Or have they just replaced one rat race with another? Do they have the money to feed themselves and/or are they filled with regret?

But not everyone has the guts to actually pull the trigger—potentially forever ending a career you might have spent a decade or more trying to build. It takes a special kind of work-hater to leave the nine-to-five grind entirely, maybe even starting a new technology-free existence as a bartender or dog walker or goat milker.

I haven't gone back to the nine-to-five, and I don't think I ever will. I've learned that anything you're doing is going to take up time and energy, so you might as well do something you love, something helping you learn on a spiritual level, not just something that will get you a house and car.

The pay in journalism is truthfully better than farming. But at least farming was more interesting—I needed something to do with my body. After a couple of years of farming, I knew I couldn't raise a family on that income, so I've gone back to school for massage therapy.

I went to farming next because my parents taught me a bit about gardening, and I had opportunity to help take over an organic farm from an owner looking to retire. I really put my writing skills to one side, and started using other parts of my body, rather than using my brain all the time. When my boss at the Telegram called me back two or three months later, I told him I was blissfully weeding cauliflower.

I wrote a lot of medical stories, one man I interviewed needed to be flown to Nova Scotia for epilepsy treatment… I was told to drop the story, then he threatened to kill himself. He called and said you have to write a story about me, and they told me to hang up on him. For me that was really hard. I realized I needed to go somewhere else where I could make a difference and relate to people in a human way—as opposed to doing busy work for the hungry internet machine.

I've been doing this full time for four months now, and it's the greatest thing I've ever done. I'm so insanely happy. I get this new emotion I call stress-cited. I'm stress-cited all the time. I don't mind being stressed when the game is mine.

I had money but I didn't have time to do the things I enjoy. I didn't feel like I was making a difference, it didn't feel like it was my journey. I've always been a creative person. I've usually had something on the side that relieved the monotony of working nine-to-five. Three years ago I started a line of crochet-ware—mostly hats, mittens, and scarves—and I do screen printing as well.

I struggle with mental illness, I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder four years ago and suffer from related depression and anxiety. It got to a point where I was doing really well, and then I just couldn't keep up anymore. I was taking sick days. It came to a head back in March—I couldn't leave the house for a couple weeks. Just the thought of going to that environment made my body shut down. Literally nope, can't leave.

I've been in customer service or the finance industry for 13 years. Earlier this year I was working in securities and investments, and I was personally investing thousands and thousands of dollars each day. It was very high stress—lots of pressure from the people I worked for, and extremely long hours. I would go in at 7 AM and not know when I'd be leaving for the day. Basically no work-life balance, which is typical for that kind of corporation that says they're all about mental health and wellbeing but they're just not.

In my last job I had just spent $1,400 on a new desktop computer when they went under. They laid everybody off. That did it in for me, I needed to make money and I was going nowhere with writing.

I guess I started right out of journalism school, and it was free internship after free internship, low-paid job after low-paid job. I worked at a music rag, a wedding magazine, I interned at CTV. I worked at another Groupon-type place. I was just grinding out crap day-in and day-out and I hated it.

If things get bad would I have to go back and get another crummy job? OK, that's fine, I've been doing that my whole life. It's just money. If you need to go waitress you'll do it, but working a job that's crushing your soul—life's too short for that.

In hindsight I wish I had maybe taken a few more months to plan to quit my job and save a bit more. It all happened within a month. Financially I have enough that if I want to go out for dinner with someone I can. Can I go on a vacation? No. But I also never wanted those kinds of things. I'm not just getting by, things are OK, but when bills come up I think 'Hmmm, how is this going to work?' But it always does.

My schedule is relatively fluid. Now I get up around the same time, putter around, I might sit and turn out a few dogshit ideas. Then I might go to lunch with friends and come back and try again. It's not usually until the rest of the world quiets down, and all my peers are online talking about their struggle, I start to get creative.

I had dog walked while in school, and so I started dog walking again. It immediately changed everything. Everything got better. I was working with another woman who owned the company. The hours were usually 10 to 3, and I was making just as much money as I was writing. The payoff was pretty immediate. I was paid per dog, so once you get comfortable with a larger pack of dogs, you can walk more during the day.

There was no pressure anymore which was really nice. I didn't want the pressure, and my days went to something more relaxing. I felt accomplished at the end of the day. It leaves time to do other things, like I can still write in my spare time. It wasn't as fully draining as a day of writing, where I went from daylight to dusk just staring at a computer and realizing I haven't done anything.

Aziza, 33

PR consultant turned goat milker

I was stuck in an office cubicle for eight-plus hours a day feeling like I was working endless hours all week just for two days off. I was always broke, always struggling to keep my head above water.

I was doing a lot of assembling media reports every morning, calls with clients, and admin stuff as well, keeping the company rolling and keeping clients happy. There was a lot of make-work, and so my title didn't necessarily reflect what I did. I was given all the leftovers and things other people didn't want to deal with.