The BLS's records of the labor force participation rate alone are pretty intense. https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...
2000-2016: -4.3% LFPR
2016-2020: +1% LFPR
Current: 0.2% below what we were in September 2015 (while currently in a sharply increasing trend)
The graph is eye popping, but the numbers themselves don't seem particularly exceptional.
Really, where this chart is misleading is that there are likely different cohorts. If stratified by decade of birth I would expect boomers to be most of the difference, and maybe even millenials offsetting it. And if so, there are at least two great resignation stories to tell:
1. Boomers resigning, as long predicted. in the 2008 crisis everyone expected them to retire but that didn't really happen. maybe happened this time
2. The rest of us resigning one job to start another, filling the vacancies created by story #1, and creating its own cycle of job hopping for salary bumps.
Changes are probably at the margins but those can still be significant in the aggregate. There are obviously many people (of all generations) that can't afford to just pack it. But there are also a lot of Boomers, among others, who--thanks in part to a long bull market--don't have to keep working and there are a lot of reasons to imagine why now might be as good a time as any to wind down full-time employment.