Why work stops working long before you admit it
Most people don’t wake up one morning and decide they hate their job.
It happens much more quietly than that.
You stop caring in small ways. You deliver, but without energy. You do well enough to avoid scrutiny, but not badly enough to force change. You tell yourself you’re just tired, or that this is what adulthood looks like.
From the outside, things appear fine. You’re competent. Reliable. Often successful. From the inside, something has gone flat.
This is where smart people start negotiating with themselves.
You remind yourself of the salary. The security. The flexibility. The people who have it worse. You say things like, “It’s not forever,” or “I should be grateful,” as if gratitude is meant to cancel out dissatisfaction.
Then comes the thinking.
You analyse your options. You research endlessly. You revisit your CV without sending it anywhere. You consider courses, side projects, future versions of yourself. You convince yourself you’re being strategic, when really you’re just postponing a decision you don’t want to make yet.
Here’s the blind spot:
intelligent people are exceptionally good at rationalising inertia.
We call it being sensible. We tell ourselves we’re waiting for the right moment, the right offer, the right level of confidence. But confidence, inconveniently, tends to arrive after action, not before it.
So nothing changes.
Because you’re capable, the situation never collapses. There’s no crisis. No dramatic failure. Just a low-level dissatisfaction that slowly becomes normal. And normal is dangerous, because it doesn’t demand anything from you.
People often describe this as feeling “stuck,” but stuck usually means undecided. And undecided usually means avoiding a trade-off you don’t want to face.
The problem isn’t that you don’t know your worth. It’s that knowing it hasn’t changed your behaviour. Not yet.
Clarity doesn’t come from another round of thinking. It comes from seeing what staying put is protecting, what it’s costing, and why the discomfort of change still feels greater than the discomfort of staying exactly where you are.
Once that blind spot becomes visible, the situation tends to shift. Not because the answer suddenly appears, but because pretending not to see it stops working. And from there, movement becomes possible again.
