“If you’re so unhappy at work, why don’t you just leave?”
It’s the question every unhappy corporate employee eventually hears, usually from someone who means well. Perhaps you’ve just spent 20 minutes providing an in-depth explanation of a manager who undermines you at every step, or a workload that always swallows your weekends, and the solution comes back in 11 words, as though it had been sitting there all along and you just needed to think of it.
I mean, seriously. If leaving your job were that easy, you’d have done it already. If you’re anything like I was before I made my great escape back in 2021, you’ve probably drafted the resignation email in your head more times than you’d care to admit, and yet you’re still there.
Telling you to leave a job you’re unhappy with is an incredibly simplistic response to a complex issue. The fact is that most of us can’t simply walk away from a job because we’re unhappy. We all have bills to pay, and many of us have other people depending on us.
Beyond the obvious financial implications, why do so many of us stay in jobs we want to leave? How much comes down to circumstances, and how much is psychological? And why do we keep putting the responsibility on employees to leave, rather than expecting employers to build better workplaces?
What you’d give up
The first problem with “just leave” is that it counts everything wrong with your current job and nothing you’d lose by walking out of it. Researchers have a name for those hidden costs: job embeddedness, which is guided by three distinct factors:
Links are the connections you’ve built through work. Think of someone who’s been with the same organisation for 10 or 15 years. They’ve built relationships with colleagues and across the company’s network, and they’ve probably become quite attached to the people they work with. Even if they’re unhappy with parts of the job, leaving means giving those relationships up.
Fit is how well the job slots into your life. Maybe the office is close to home, or you’ve got flexible arrangements that let you manage family responsibilities, or your hours suit your circumstances. You might dislike your manager and be thoroughly frustrated with the company, but those practical arrangements can be very hard to replace.
Sacrifice is what you stand to lose by leaving, e.g. your salary, accumulated benefits, long-service entitlements, or the security of knowing exactly what you’ll be paid each month.
When you put those three together, you can start to see why leaving any job is complicated. You might be sick of your job, but you also have a mortgage and kids, and a flexible arrangement you spent years negotiating. When somebody tells you to just find another job, they’re overlooking everything you might have to give up.
Being embedded isn’t necessarily a bad thing - strong workplace relationships and a sense of belonging contribute to wellbeing. It turns into a problem when the things keeping you in a job become more important than whether the job is still right for you.
Leaving for the great unknown
The second problem with telling you to just leave your job is that leaving swaps something you know for something you don’t. There’s no guarantee the next job will be better than the current one. In fact, it could be a lot worse.
You can do your due diligence on a company before your join, but there’s only so much you can learn before you start - and let’s face it, most companies put on their best face during recruitment. A terrible manager or high workload in your current company is at least a known quantity. That gamble gets bigger the further you are into your career, when you may have spent years building a decent salary and working arrangements that suit your life.
Then there’s the job market - which is by all accounts really tough in most countries at the moment. “Just find another job” assumes suitable jobs exist and that you’ll be able to land one, and depending on the market, neither is guaranteed. The further you progress, the more specific your experience becomes, which makes you valuable to an employer but doesn’t mean hundreds of opportunities are waiting. If you want a similar level, comparable pay and arrangements that fit around your family, the number of jobs you can realistically consider gets small.
Of course, an advertised job isn’t the same as a genuine option, because you may be up against other highly qualified candidates, and recruitment can take months with no guarantee of an offer. Meanwhile, the bills keep arriving.
It’s easy to tell someone to prioritise their happiness over their salary, but much harder to do when you’re keeping a roof over your family’s head. Trust me, I’ve been there.
The payoff may not even last
The third problem is that even if you do find something better, the lift in happiness may be smaller and shorter than you expect. Most of us have felt the buzz of starting somewhere new, especially when we’re leaving something bad for something that isn’t significantly worse. There’s a name for it, and for what comes next: the honeymoon–hangover effect.
This is when you start a new job and everything seems wonderful. You’re excited, meeting new people, feeling stimulated and engaged, and pleased with your decision. That’s the honeymoon. Unfortunately, for a lot of people, that boost in satisfaction gradually wears off as they settle into the role.
A 2021 study in the Journal of Organizational Behavior looked at this using data from a British survey that followed around 10,000 people over 18 years. It found that the direction of a career move made a significant difference.
People who moved up into a higher occupational category, presumably for more challenge, responsibility and perhaps money, got an initial boost in job satisfaction. By the third year, though, it had returned to where it started. People who moved down saw their satisfaction fall, and that dissatisfaction lasted for at least four years.
In a tough job market like what we’ve got right now, escaping an unhappy workplace may mean accepting a less senior role, and not being any happier for it. It’s understandable if you’re hesitating to take that risk.
Why is it always up to the employee?
You’re probably starting to appreciate why “just leave your job if you hate it” looks like a very small answer to a very large question. It also removes someone very important from the conversation - the employer.
When someone is unhappy at work, why is our first response so often to tell that person to leave? Why aren’t we asking what the company could do differently to make people want to stay? Is the workplace anti-social, or even unsafe? Why do we tolerate so much dysfunction from companies, when they should be held to the same standards as other institutions in our society?
Telling people to leave if they don’t like their jobs puts the entire responsibility on the employee. If employers genuinely want people to stay, they need to take responsibility for creating workplaces people want to be part of.
What to do if you can’t leave yet
So what do you do when you know you’re unhappy, but leaving doesn’t feel realistic? Here’s what I’d suggest.
Work out exactly what’s making you unhappy. Is it your manager? The workload? The expectations around your availability? Or have you reached a point where the kind of work you do no longer suits the life you want? Some of those things may be negotiable. You might be able to change your working arrangements or move into a different role within the company. That depends on your workplace and your role, but it’s always worth asking.
Start creating options before you desperately need them. That might mean researching the job market, reconnecting with people in your professional network, or working out what financial position you’d need to be in to make a move. You don’t have to quit tomorrow to start preparing for a different future.
Pay attention to what staying is costing you. It’s easy to get so used to being exhausted that you start treating it as normal, which is exactly what happened to me.
Sometimes staying really is the most sensible decision, at least for now. However, that doesn’t mean you have to accept your circumstances indefinitely, and it certainly doesn’t mean your employer has no responsibility for improving them.
Please know that staying isn’t a personal failure
If you’re in a job that’s making you unhappy and someone tells you to just leave, which they will, please remember that it’s rarely that simple. People stay in jobs they dislike for all sorts of reasons, and many of them are completely defensible. I think we need to be more understanding of that.
We also need to expect more of employers. Companies are part of society, and they’re not entitled to do whatever they like in the endless quest to make money. I will always die on the hill that everyone deserves a working life that doesn’t leave them miserable or exhausted. Sometimes getting there takes time… and that’s okay too.
One thing I’m thinking about this week
The question I keep coming back to is who pays for workplace burnout. Right now, it’s the person who burns out. They cover the cost through their health, their income and often their career, and then they’re told to be more resilient or to try a wellbeing program. Meanwhile, the company that created the conditions pays… well, nothing.
If a job takes superhuman levels of resilience just to survive, and numerous employees are experiencing burnout, the job is the problem. And a corporate wellbeing industry that mostly teaches exhausted people to tolerate unreasonable workloads only reinforces the idea that the fault lies with them. If companies did the right thing, it wouldn’t need to exist.
For that to change, the cost has to move. I think workplace burnout should be treated as a public health issue: independently measured and reported, with companies that record persistently high rates among their employees paying additional tax. If businesses are going to profit from working people into the ground, they should help cover the public health costs of the damage.
Until it costs them something, “just be more resilient” will stay the default advice. And employees will keep paying the price for it.
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