OPENING
Most of us, at some point in our lives, will question whether we're on the right career path. For some, that questioning comes after months or even years of going to work in a state of low-level malaise. Nothing dramatic happened at work; there was no "oh shit" moment when you woke up in a cold sweat, realizing that you had made a catastrophic mistake by throwing yourself into a high-stress job like corporate law or running your own restaurant. But one day, you realize that you don't recognize the person you've become. The job has changed you, and not for the better.
For others, every day feels like a roller coaster; stressed and overwhelmed in one moment, calm and in control in the next. You're standing on a bed of quicksand, and small things, like a snide remark from your boss, are sufficient to make you question your commitment to your profession. But your job is stable, and it took you forever to get here, so you spend your time passively checking out job advertisements rather than actually applying for anything.
Our feelings about our careers are as rich and complex as the feelings we have about our relationships with our loved ones. We experience jealousy and resentment, ambivalence and excitement. Yet when it comes to making life-altering choices about these careers, often our feelings aren't what guide our decisions. Instead, the conversation about changing jobs, even among workplace experts, is usually centered around the structural and practical decisions we need to make. Do I want a job that is remote or one that is in person? Should I work for a start-up company that I believe in or take a stable (but boring) job at a well-established place? Most traditional career advice around job unhappiness and job change focuses on practical issues.
For Job Therapy, I decided to take a different approach and focus on people's feelings and their psychological relationship with their career.
As a psychology professor at New York University, I'm an expert on interpersonal relationships and communication. As a social scientist, I've studied the language people use in dozens of social contexts, from negotiations at work to interactions between physicians and patients in the doctor's office. Outside the lab, I've applied my expertise in the science of communication to help hundreds of people resolve conflicts in the workplace. My first book, Jerks at Work, applied tried-and-true techniques used in relationship therapy to tension-filled interactions between coworkers and bosses. When I started conducting surveys for this book, asking thousands of working people about their careers and interviewing people struggling with their careers, I noticed two striking things:
* People who were unhappy at work identified deeper psychological reasons for their unhappiness than the reasons we typically focus on: a lack of interest and burnout.
* The language people used to describe their feelings about work was similar to the language they used to describe their feelings about their relationship partners.
About two years ago, when we were all crawling out of the pandemic, I noticed that the conversations I was having with people about work were going in directions I hadn't experienced before. I was talking with an employee who was accused of "taking over" the work of her coworkers, when the conversation quickly turned from a discussion about fraught relationship dynamics to a deeper unresolved feeling of doing all of the right things to get ahead, but still being passed up for promotions. I spoke to another person who was dealing with a credit-stealing boss. We spent a few minutes answering the question "How can I protect my ideas?" before she told me, "I don't know if this career still defines me in the way it used to." The people I spoke with would start with ostensibly solvable problems—or at least ones that felt constrained to specific situations and relationships—but would quickly zoom out, revealing big-picture problems and the deep psychological struggles they were having with their careers. Something much more was going on with people than bad bosses and salty coworkers, and I could sense it in the language they were using. They weren't just talking about their relationships at work, they were talking about their relationships with their entire careers.
I was curious if other workplace experts were observing the same trend, so I checked in with Jacqui Brassey, coleader at the McKinsey Health Institute, researcher, and author. Jacqui has her finger on the pulse of workplace changes—and not just the structural ones we're seeing, but the psychological drivers behind them. She told me that although she, too, has noticed that many people seem unhappy with their jobs and careers, she has sensed that they are struggling to figure out why. There's an ambivalence in the air, she told me; people are torn between their desire for predictability, which is pulling them toward more traditional career paths, and their desire to break free from tradition. Throughout our conversation, she used phrases like a "big awakening" and an increase in "openness to new experiences" to describe these trends. Interestingly, our conversation was almost entirely about people's emotions and psychological states. We barely touched upon the structural issues that were dominating conversations among experts at the time, like changes in hybrid work.
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