I've worked with a lot of broadcasters over the years, and I say this with affection: walking away is harder for them than for almost anyone. When your voice is the product and your name is on the show, leaving the studio can feel like leaving yourself behind.

Which is why I wanted to sit down with Jay-Jay Feeney.

Jay-Jay was on New Zealand radio for 33 years. Twenty-three of them at The Edge, most of it on breakfast, then drive on More FM. Her last day on air was July 2024. She was fifty. When she was thirty, she assumed she'd be doing it until the end. "I'd even joke, I'm gonna die on the microphone."

Breakfast radio nearly finished her long before that. Up at four every morning, four hours of fresh content every day, for years. She was so exhausted she couldn't imagine ever not feeling tired. Moving to afternoons fixed the sleep and killed the challenge. Radio had become, her word, a chore. Like a long relationship where you're so comfortable you forget to make things exciting.

So why stay? Fear. She went into radio as a teenager and learned everything on the job. "What else do I know? My CV is basically just experience. I thought, what will I do? Who am I? What will I be?"

Then something snapped. "I thought about it for a while and then I thought, stuff it. I'm actually quitting."

No plan B. The plan was three months off and a bit of MCing. The idea for a podcast studio arrived a week after she quit. Today she co-owns PodLab, an Auckland podcast and video studio, with Dom Harvey. Business partner, former co-host and, yes, ex-husband. Most people can't share a fridge with a past partner. These two run a company. "We trust each other more than anyone." (Also, in her words, "Dom is very, very, very good at just doing what I say.")

I asked her the question I ask everyone: reinvention or reversioning? She didn't blink.

"Definitely a reversion. I just did something that's already kind of in my wheelhouse. The thing that's not in my wheelhouse is running a business."

Thirty-three years didn't get thrown away. They became the asset. Credibility, trust, a name people already knew. "I didn't have to start from scratch and try to sell myself." What she didn't have, she's learning on the fly: buried in admin, mystified by the financial side, paying bills to an IT company she never sees and a fire alarm guy who turns up every fortnight. She's fine with all of it. "We're a boutique business. I'm not gonna make millions of dollars. I just wanna be happy and make other people happy and do cool things."

But the moment that stayed with me came when I pushed on the harder question. Plenty of people are unhappy at work. Why could she leave when they can't?

"You can be unhappy and just think that you deserve it."

That's the trap, right there. Not the mortgage, not the market, not the CV. The quiet belief that this is simply what you get. Jay-Jay reached the other conclusion. "I want to be in control of my life now. I want to be excited to get up again."

She's honest about the cushion, too. She owned her apartment, so the worst case was selling it and living off the proceeds. Having something to fall back on buys courage, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. By fifty, she reckons, that's exactly the kind of out you should have built yourself.

Ask yourself the question Jay-Jay finally asked herself: do you want to feel like this forever? Then the harder one: somewhere along the way, did you decide you deserve it? Write down how long you've been making the same complaint about your work. If the answer is years, you're not stuck. You've settled. And settled, as Jay-Jay proved, can be resigned from.

Here's the maths that got me. When she left radio at fifty, she'd been on air for 33 years. All going well, she has another thirty-odd in front of her. That's not a retirement lap. That's a whole second career, as long as the first.

Or as she put it: "Just do what you want to do. Give yourself the chance to be happy. And you never know, it might be bloody awesome."