The night Shannon Carroll learned her job as a business reporter was gone, TikTok showed her someone walking the Camino de Santiago. Her Washington apartment lease ended the same day her job did. “This seemed like a better plan than refreshing LinkedIn until my soul left my body.”
So she trained — four or five hours a day on a walking pad in her parents’ basement, in a weighted vest, “preparing for a 1,000-year-old pilgrimage by cosplaying as a hamster” — packed moleskin and retinol, and in late April walked up the Pyrenees with a 16-pound pack. Twenty-six days and 500 miles later she reached the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, collected her certificate, ate sea barnacles, and cried at nothing. She laughed instead.
What the road was actually like
Bunk beds in 15-euro hostels with 60 strangers proving snoring is an international language. Blister-drainage protocols discussed with people she had met an hour before. A day she thought was 20 miles that was 22, in a downpour, on red clay, with no internet and no bed reserved — a call to her sister, sobbing, and then the town appeared. A fountain outside Estella that dispensed wine. Four nuns in Carrión de los Condes, two on guitar, one on tambourine, one on drums, leading a room of pilgrims through “Country Roads” in a pileup of accents because she asked. An 82-year-old on his 17th Camino who walked with her for 40 minutes and then left her behind.
The pilgrims carried “very 2026 reasons — burnout, career panic, grief, retirement, faith, escape.” The office in Santiago handed out 530,000 certificates last year. That is a lot of people between lives.
The part the essay does not say
She could do this because the lease ended, the severance existed, and there was a basement to train in. Not everyone laid off in the AI cuts gets a month in Spain; most get a spreadsheet. The Journal’s Tuesday paper carried the other side of the same labor market — EY paying up to $25,000 to reward judgment and adaptability because AI has made the routine work cheap, and, last week, one job ad in five turning out to be a ghost. Past fifty, we tell clients, the emergency fund is a job-search fund: twelve months of expenses, sized before the layoff, in bills, untouched by the market. It is the money that lets you walk instead of panic. She had it. Then she kept walking.