Sometimes Being an Adult Means Hating Your Job

Five reasons to say yes to an opportunity you’re not wild about

Renata Leo is 31-years-old and lives with her parents in Glassboro, New Jersey.

She sleeps in her childhood room. Even the unicorn wallpaper from her childhood remains. When she got engaged, her fiancé moved into the unicorn room with her.

They were on the verge of buying a starter home, but then the steep uptick in housing costs during the pandemic priced them out of the market. She and her fiancé broke up last summer.

What about Renata’s job prospects?

You’d think she’d have plenty of opportunities. After all, she was valedictorian of her high school class.

Renata went on to graduate from college in 2015, and amassed $20,000 in student-loan debt. She landed a full-time job at a startup, but lost it in 2021. Since then she’s been working part time. Recently she had a chance encounter with her high school principal, and that reminded her of the gap between her expectations at 18 and where she is today.

“I feel like a failure,” she says.

She’s far behind where her parents were when they were her age. By the time they were 31, they had gotten married, bought a home, and had Renata. Even so, mom and dad aren’t pushing her out of the nest.

In fact, her parents say they’re fine with their daughter holding out for a job she loves.

It’s easy to sympathize with Renata’s parents.

We parents yearn to see our kids be happy. We certainly don’t want them sentenced to a lifetime of drudgery.

We can also sympathize with Renata.

We humans are insatiable. We don’t just want a paycheck. We want a job that excites us, one that allows us to be who we think we’re meant to be.

And careers are quite path dependent.

Take a step in one direction and everything from the skills you develop to the network of people you’ve formed will nudge you to move further along that same path. Often the longer you stay on a path you hate, the harder it is to change careers.

So say no to the well-paying opportunity in a field you hate if it would be especially hard to segue into a different field. But path dependence isn’t inevitable. Countless people start their careers in one field and end up in another. Short term discomfort, even short-term misery, can lead to long-term happiness.

Drudgery can also lead to things more important than happiness.

In other words, there are lots of reasons to take a job you’re not wild about. Here are five.