Most of the conversations I have with people who are stuck in miserable jobs center on what that person is experiencing and what they fear might happen next. We zero in on questions of identity, purpose, and a better way to live. It can take a while before we get to how their misery shows up at home.
If you are in this situation, this episode will offer a different perspective as you contemplate your next move. Unless you are a remote-working hermit on a mountaintop, your work life affects other people around you. Let’s talk about them.
What It Looks Like From the Outside
Imagine a person who runs her own business, or is in a job she likes, or is semi-retired and busy with part-time work and volunteering. It took her a long time to get to this spot, and she’s grateful for the life she’s leading. With one exception: every evening, in walks the person she loves, and they are weighed down by a job they hate. She hears the complaints, knows all of the work team members by name even though she’s never met them. She does not get paid to do this job, obviously, but she is doing a lot of emotional labor for free. Her proximity to misery creates its own weight, and that affects her ability to be present in her life.
The person stuck in the bad job often can’t see what’s happening. They are too busy surviving each day to notice what they bring home with them. Having an empathetic ear and people to vent to is great, but that stress accumulates and everyone feels it. This isn’t about blame – no one is doing this on purpose. It’s just about awareness.
The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Staying
Let’s say it’s you who is stuck in a job that wore out its welcome long ago. You may have some solid-sounding stories about why you’re staying: financial stability, health insurance, not disrupting the household. You may worry that the team you lead isn’t in a good place, and that everything will fall apart if you leave. Or that you can’t disappoint the people who rely on you.
Those real considerations do a couple of extra things: they make staying feel noble, and they help you gloss over your fear. You can probably name those fears in a whisper, if not aloud. You would lose the status and respectability that your job provides. The structure and routine that you’ve come to rely on. And you might genuinely like the people you work with: you’d lose them too.
Because those losses can feel overwhelming, it’s a lot easier to tell a story of sacrifice.
How Corporate Loyalty Culture Makes Leaving Feel Wrong
In order to accurately name what you fear the most, it can help to step back and look at the corporate culture you grew up in. If you’re a GenXer like me, we spent our entire careers being told that loyalty was job 1. That if we put in the long hours and were good soldiers for the company, we would be rewarded. You may look back at your career progression and think, check! I WAS rewarded. It all worked out. So why would you start believing something different now?
It takes only a brief glance at news headlines to see how corporations view loyalty: as the recipients, not the providers. Loyalty only ever flowed one way: from employee to employer. Understanding that now can feel like a deep betrayal, which is yet another loss.
So you’re up against a lot of cultural conditioning and loss avoidance. Your resistance is understandable, especially if you haven’t focused on figuring out what you might do after you leave.
Burden-Sharing vs. Burden-Dumping
You could be spending a lot of time mulling and fretting over your decision. Are you also having actual conversations about it friends and family? Or are they mostly hearing about the terrible choices your manager is making and how the company keeps trimming your benefits? If so, you could be using the people closest to you as a pressure release valve for your accumulated unhappiness.
It’s the difference between burden-sharing and burden-dumping. Burden sharing is healthy and requires your vulnerability. Here’s what’s going on, here’s what I’m afraid of, and where I need help.
Burden-dumping is what happens when none of that is said explicitly but the energy comes out anyway, in irritability or withdrawal. A tension might settle onto the house like a fog. The people on the receiving end of burden-dumping know something is wrong, but they can’t name it because the real conversation never happened.
Now your partner is tiptoeing around you because they figured out which questions are out of bounds. If you’ve ever spent time around an unpredictable person, you know what that level of vigilance feels like: a sharpening of nerve endings, of feeling more skittish, of being exhausted for no apparent reason.
I’ve experienced this myself, only realizing after several months that I was absorbing my partner’s work stress and it was coming out in uncharacteristic ways, like excessive baking, or withdrawing from social circles.
What helped was both of us starting to name the fears, to normalize them. When we say it out loud, we take away some of its power to control us. Only then could we consider what life and work might look like after that job is over.
Why Staying Might Not Be Protecting Anyone
If one of your goals is to authentically protect the people you love, staying in that job might be working against that goal. You may be spending time wishing the old version of the company would come back; the one where you were all in it together, cranking on fun work and learning a lot. Knowing what is possible to feel makes it easy to ignore what is actually happening right now.
The present day version of you is bearing a cost, and you may be sharing that cost with others.
It can be scary to make a plan, or even have that initial conversation about what is below your resistance to change. But that’s actually the protective move, for yourself and the people you love. The protection that comes from staying is partly financial, and partly an illusion. You are not in control of employment for a company that you do not own. Staying while miserable primarily benefits the company; the same company you’ve been complaining about for a long time.
If you aren’t ready to name and address the deeper fears that come with leaving the job, start here: ask your partner, close friends, or other family members how your job affects them. Is that something they signed up for? What is it making them do, say, or feel that they would prefer not to?
Sometimes we need to see ourselves reflected in others to believe that something is true. Rather than using people to burden-dump, ask them to help you more clearly understand the cost that you are all bearing.
Burn the map. Build what fits.
