Why am I unhappy in this job?
“I’m so miserable in this job” is probably something you’ve thought about or even said out loud on a number of occasions. If you didn’t, you probably wouldn’t be here reading this to begin with. When we think or say that line (or one just like it) we will often reach for what feels like the easiest escape hatch. I need to find a new job
And while that might eventually be the outcome you end up at anyways, if you don’t approach it from a grounded place in what’s actually going on, I promise you’ll end up right back in the same scenario. So many people before you have countless stories on how they always seem to end up in the same type of environment over and over.
BUT!
Before I continue… I don’t want to discredit that those environments are real, they are toxic, they are abusive, they are controlling, and they really do cause a lot of harm. You’re not making that up. The larger point is that our window for tolerance and ability to navigate that type of environment becomes a whole lot harder if we don’t really understand what’s going on.
So we can start with an important, and often unanswered, question: what, specifically, is making you unhappy?
Is the workload unreasonable? Are expectations unclear? Do you dislike the work itself? Have you given up so much of your life to keep doing it that you no longer recognize yourself? Am I losing more and more of myself and my life each week?
Then we get to also reflect on, where has this shown up in the past? Have I ended up in similar jobs just like this? Were there warning signs I overlooked during interviews? Did I even know what I needed to ask about? Or was I so focused on getting away from my last job, that I never got clear about what I was really moving toward?
Without that clarity, you can choose a different company and discover a familiar problem. Because the truth is, you will almost always find yourself right back in another toxic work environment. Some are just worse than others. But the more we find ourselves in them, running from one to the other, the lower our tolerance becomes. We stop being able to handle it at all and it completely consumes our lives.
But how does that happen? How do we end up losing ourselves in our career?
How much of myself have I tied to my career?
Work has real power over our lives. Our income pays for food, housing, our families, and the things we enjoy. And often, protecting that income becomes the #1 priority of all else.
Sometimes, though, we respond to that dependence by sacrificing more and more of ourselves. We work extra hours or give up another evening, even when we have no clear evidence that doing so is necessary to keep our job.
When work also becomes the place we look for proof of our worth, the stakes get even higher. Criticism of something we made can feel like a judgment of who we are. Being passed over for a promotion can start to mean “I’m not valuable.”
That is what happens when your identity becomes fused with your career. They become one and the same. They become dependent on each other. You are your career.
One place I see this becoming painfully clear are the stories people tell that are surprised by a layoff. Imagine giving a company years of extra hours, missed dinners, and postponed plans, then learning that your role has been eliminated. Alongside the financial fear, there can be grief, anger, and a devastating question: what was all that sacrifice for?
Work is not your family. People at work may care deeply about you, but that care cannot guarantee your place in the business. See the business has a math equation that has to work out, and when it doesn’t, you become a variable that balances that equation. You’re a line in a spreadsheet. One of the hardest parts about being a manager myself, was watching my entire team turn into a bar chart… They were no longer people with names, families, interest, hobbies, passions, and hearts. They were numbers in a table that had to fit beneath a threshold.
So the way companies ultimately have to look at you, does not determine your worth… I don’t care what the bar chart says. But if your career has become the foundation of your identity, it can feel as though it does.
Two reflections can help you explore that relationship. If I ask you what you do for a living, how do you describe it? If you say “I’m a product manager” see what happens when you try saying “I do product management.” I know it feels odd to say, I’m sure, but that’s an example of how the system is setup to tie our identity and worth to our careers. Those two lines look nearly identical to most people, but they mean two very very different things. And it changes the relationship between you and your career. One says who you are the other says what you do. And only one of those sentences maintains your full identity as a complete person if the title/job disappears tomorrow.
Next, consider criticism you’ve received or a missed promotion. Does it hurt because something important happened, or does it become evidence that you are inadequate as a person? It can be both, since feeling hurt is part of the human experience. The question is what you conclude about your worth.
What do I need the next job to change?
So once you’ve gone through the really hard work of pulling those two pieces apart (which can be a long journey, not always something you do over night - afterall, it became fused over a long period of time), you can start reflecting on what your current job is missing and what you need your new job to have instead:
- Energy: How tired, motivated, or depleted do I feel?
- Clarity: Do I understand what is expected of me and where I want to go?
- Career satisfaction: What do I look forward to, and what do I dread?
- Understanding myself: What matters to me beyond my title, salary, and recognition?
Then look at two things: which conditions at work are affecting those answers, and how much you are relying on work to tell you who you are.
I have worked with clients whose jobs became more tolerable as they rediscovered themselves and began separating their worth from their work. That did not make every workplace problem disappear, but it changed how much of themselves was caught up in it. They could tolerate the chaos of work and the abusive bosses, because they knew their worth as a human being was independent from anything that happened at work.
You do not need to finish that exploration before you are allowed to leave by the way… because sometimes, we really do need the space and break. Even if we end up right back in a similar situation, sometimes it doesn’t become intolerable until after we’ve been there for a few months. Sometimes, those few months can be just the breathing room we need to change our relationship with work.
So it ultimately comes down to the same thing I tell everyone… you do exactly what you need to do to get through this life.
It’s the only one we have.
