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Antiwork

Very specific phobia/mental spiral keeps me from ever quitting a bad job- anyone else?

Disclaimer, there will be some frank discussions of money here, and I admit I'm on the privileged end of things. I normally wouldn't mention this stuff but it ties directly into my post, so whatever. Ever since I graduated college during the 2008 recession, I've always had a strong scarcity mindset toward work/jobs. Like many here, I don't work because it's my passion or my dream, I do it because I want to be financially secure and if I happen to like my job it's a big upside. Perhaps I actually did have money troubles in my early 20s, but now in my 30s my husband and I make enough money that if one of us stopped working for a year, we'd be fine. All that said, I still live in fear of getting fired, and refuse to ever quit my job, and it's put me in really crappy situations.…


Disclaimer, there will be some frank discussions of money here, and I admit I'm on the privileged end of things. I normally wouldn't mention this stuff but it ties directly into my post, so whatever.

Ever since I graduated college during the 2008 recession, I've always had a strong scarcity mindset toward work/jobs. Like many here, I don't work because it's my passion or my dream, I do it because I want to be financially secure and if I happen to like my job it's a big upside. Perhaps I actually did have money troubles in my early 20s, but now in my 30s my husband and I make enough money that if one of us stopped working for a year, we'd be fine. All that said, I still live in fear of getting fired, and refuse to ever quit my job, and it's put me in really crappy situations. I see women my age with less money than me who don't even work and I don't know how they aren't constantly worried about what would happen if their husband died or divorced them, or even just lost his job. I didn't even grow up poor, but I'm constantly afraid of reaching some dead end with my career where I get fired and am unable to ever get hired again. I would LOVE to take a year off to just be a mom, but the thing stopping me from doing this is the fear that if I do it, I'll never be able to get a good job again.

I have no interest in climbing the corporate ladder, owning a company, or even being a manager. I like my current job as an individual contributor and would like to keep doing that, probably for the rest of my career. I actually really love my current company, this is more on an ongoing pattern in my past.

Basically the spiral goes like this:

  • The assumption that my current job is the best I can ever do (even at companies that are so miserable they may actually have been illegal)
  • The assumption that if I get fired, and it takes months to get hired again, I will have a gap that makes me unhireable. This has actually happened before (was fired and was laid off) and nobody ever mentioned the gaps- which were about 3-4 months, so I keep thinking “If there's ONE more gap, it'll be the end of me.”
  • The assumption that there's something innate about me that makes me unhireable- like the fact that I'm a mother, or the fact that I have a disability (which I don't even disclose, and isn't physical, so it tends not to come up)
  • The assumption that my particular dealbreakers for a job (mostly involving working from home and not traveling- not really comp related at all) will prevent me from ever finding another job (this also hasn't been the case- I've been fully remote and not traveling since before covid)
  • My husband will get mad at me for not working and force me to take a job that violates one of my dealbreakers (I have nightmares about spending all night in an office away from my kids)- however I've talked to my husband and he says he would back me up on taking time to find something that allowed remote work, even if it took a year.

Whether the economy is good or bad, I always wind up falling back into this spiral. Every time I have a hiccup at work, I go back to “Well, this is it for me, and I'll never get hired again because XYZ” At my previous company, I wasn't happy (I loved that I could WFH but the company was a total shitshow), and I sucked it up because I kept thinking “No other company will let me work from home.” Sure enough, I passed up multiple recruiters contacting me (not sure why I did this!) only to get laid off….and find a job that lets me WFH a few months later.

Has anyone else escaped this spiral? Last time I was on my job search I actually posted to reddit (maybe this sub, different username) about it and people actually backed up my fears by saying it was unreasonable for me to expect to work from home, but that was actually not an issue at all in my job search. Yet no matter how many times things work out for me, I'm convinced the NEXT job search will be the one where I get screwed.

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