Lindsay Haven

Overview

Lindsay Haven is a former video game industry worker whose Marketplace Tech interview connects career exit with profit pressure, subtle gender discrimination, education, family caregiving, and community life outside paid employment.

Current Profile

Haven initially treated leaving the game industry and returning to school as a break rather than a permanent workforce exit. The pandemic, a change in family structure, and full-time caregiving altered that plan. Her account makes unpaid care and volunteering visible while showing how social expectations can still make a person feel required to justify not holding a paid job.

Key Characteristics

• Enjoyed work in video games but objected to a model centered on maximizing profit rather than delivering a good product at a set price.
• Describes subtle, unspoken gender discrimination in promotion decisions.
• Returned to school after leaving the industry and later became a full-time caregiver for a family member.
• Questions whether a desire to return to paid work is personally held or partly produced by admired peers’ expectations.
• Builds purpose through raising her child, volunteering, and participation in a local permaculture group.

Evidence

• Industry experience - Saying “so long” to the tech industry records Haven’s account of enjoying game work while encountering profit pressure and gendered promotion barriers.
• Changing exit plan - Saying “so long” to the tech industry describes school, the pandemic, family change, and caregiving as factors that turned a temporary break into a longer departure.
• Identity and community - Saying “so long” to the tech industry reports her self-description through parenting and volunteering, pressure to explain nonemployment, and involvement in permaculture.

Qualifications

The source is a short first-person case and does not name Haven’s employer, role, school program, family member receiving care, or the promotion decisions she references. It cannot establish the prevalence of gender discrimination or profit pressure across the video game industry.

What Changed

• Created Haven’s profile as a Clocked Out case linking caregiving, gendered career experience, and non-work identity.

Relationships

• Drew Haven - spouse and partner in the household’s job-free arrangement.
• Clocked Out - Marketplace series presenting her workforce-exit story.
• Family Labor Boundaries - adjacent framework for recognizing caregiving outside paid employment.
• Not Working Ambivalence / 不上班的复杂性 - captures the social pressure and identity negotiation after formal work.
• Work Role Decentering / 工作角色去中心化 - describes the redistribution of purpose into care, volunteering, and community.