> Am I missing something?

If you're making tech salaries and not spending all of it, you can easily save enough to not work for a decade in just a few years of work. Anecdotally I worked for three years at a big company and then didn't work for three years until those savings ran out, and that wasn't really even trying.

Of course the calculus changes if you're married or have kids. But living in America in a cheap town is not expensive compared to income in this field. You can live comfortably on 40k a year (lots of Americans do!). And a 200k+ income like you see in major tech hubs can easily translate to 100k+ of savings a year.

That I can totally understand. However, if we're looking at the labor market as a whole, people making comfortable tech salaries are definitely outliers. Coupled with the fact that (anecdotally) it seems many of the people who don't want to return to their old jobs (or want to resign) are either in the service industry, or have/had lower paid entry level job salaries, I'm still stuck trying to understand how these folks will survive financially.

I guess I'm trying to figure out if all these "great resignation" articles are referring to high paid skilled jobs (eg tech workers), which in my opinion wouldn't effect the economy as a whole very much since they are a relatively small portion of it, or if these articles are referring to the broad economy including lower paid jobs.

Isn't it a norm that before you resign you already signed the job offee on yor next job? So there's no down time for you?

I mentioned it in another comment, but if this is the case it feels like calling the movement a “great resignation” is a bit misleading, as a more appropriate label would be a “great company switching”

One definitely resigns when they leave one company for another.

They're not going to be unemployed, they're going to find a better job. In my mostly-uninformed opinion I think that remote work has allowed a lot of people to search for work in other locations and this has radically changed the way the employer-employee economy works. In smaller job markets talented workers didn't have much choice about where to work and there were factors to changing jobs (like commute distance) that made them rule out a lot of places.

Now, there's an abundance of positions available remotely all over the country and you can shop around for a good fit.

So in this case, instead of a "great resignation" it would be more accurate imply a "great company switching". However, doesn't this scenario assume that there are an abundant supply of "better" jobs just waiting for applicants (that are now able to apply due to remote policies)?

There obviously isn't that yet, so is the assumption that this will follow after many employees resign and force companies to redo their hiring policies?