This is going to be long and I don’t expect anyone to read. Don’t mind me. I’m just venting frustration.
I’m 27. Just “celebrated” my 1 year anniversary for my 3rd job in 4 years. I have a WFH job paying me 85k a year. I can generally afford all my expenses just fine. And I have never wanted to quit and give up more in my life. I am feeling straight up depressed suicidal these days. I feel stuck and I’m intimidated by what it would take for me to unstick myself. And I feel pathetic because I’ve let a damn accounting job do this to me.
I hate accounting so so fucking much. It’s boring and tedious and annoying. And now for the first time I have a job that’s not only tedious and annoying but its fuckin hard. I basically work at a bank accounting for loans and it is so complex and there is so much SHIT I need to know. I have never struggled academically or at any job but this job kicks my ass even if I get the job done. Almost everything requires me to rack my brain. And I don’t have the drive to learn everything there is to know about everything like my team wants and expects me to.
My boss drives me insane. She’s rude as fuck, constantly criticizing me usually by nitpicking unimportant shit on otherwise completely correct and acceptable work, and had basically told me earlier this year that I’m on the hot seat and she’s already thought about firing me. I’ve come to realize I will never satisfy her. She will always find something wrong. At any given time I have a shit ton of work to do and she wants everything to be done “asap” and creates this unwarranted pressure and sense of urgency even for shit that should be relatively low-priority. And I don’t know what the fuck she’s been doing but lately she’s not even online for 90% of the day and gets on to call or message me and my coworker at like 5:30pm to shit on our work and/or ask 6 million questions when the day is about to be over. This job drains my soul out every day and it feels like it’s not replenishing. I find it hard to want to do anything else after work which I think is fuckin nuts for an office job with no physical labor.
I work at my best friend’s house sometimes and see the difference in his and his wife’s WFH jobs. They have hours of downtime every day. They never work past 5 while I often work til 7-8pm and find myself getting up at 3, 4, 5am to try and keep up with my always-expanding task list leading to 12+ hour workdays. I watch my friend meet with his boss and it’s so friendly and chill while any communication with my boss (messages, calls, meetings where she is present) feels like I’m in an Infinite Tsukuyomi never-ending performance review. I constantly feel I’m on the cusp of being fired. They are able to completely detach from work when the day is over and actually live while the remnants of misery and headache and frustration from the day still linger in my mind even after I turn my laptop off. Sometimes I can’t even bring myself to cook and eat dinner. I literally just get off my laptop and go to bed.
All of my friends have watched me hate each of my 3 jobs since I graduated college and tell me I have to find a new line of work. But I’ve invested all this time and money (degree and CPA license) and I know it’s a sunk cost fallacy thing but the idea of having to develop a whole new skillset to escape accounting makes me feel even more miserable. And then there’s the fact that I’m looking at a paycut, maybe even a significant one, to do something else that hopefully won’t make me hate every day.
My best friend and his wife seemed to have found these perfect, actually reasonable companies. My friend and his boss took off this past Friday at his boss’s suggestion because they were “so bogged down” by meetings last week and could use a mental health day. Meanwhile I’ve been told by multiple people on my team that I need to work even harder than I do now to truly meet their expectations and advance at the company. I worked 58 hours last week.
I knew I hated accounting about 6 months into my first job out of college. I knew I wasn’t particularly interested in accounting even as I got a masters degree in the shit. I told myself the potential job security and salary growth would be worth it. Goddamn was I wrong. I feel so stuck and I feel like such a fuckin idiot because I set the trap myself.