I think there are kind of people (being part of them) that auto-pressure themself, wanted to be seen as productive with high performance and ultimetely more prone to burn-out. I think it could be a mix of an impostor syndrome and looking for manager appraisal (that sometime may never been good enough).
I think I had reach this point 8 years ago. I wanted to drop everything but maintain it with the help of my partner and a therapist. I was doing 1-2 sessions a week for 18 months and it help me to reflect on myself and cut the slack. I had to take off almost 2 morning off as the appointment were no convenient.
What could help to cut the slack is to force yourself to :
work remotely the maximum allowed by your corporation (I was even not allowing myself this given)
block the lunchtime of these days to walk outside or practice a sport (like running). It could be hard for the first 3 weeks but then you are in automatic mode
Block 1 - 2 hours reoccuring sessions in your calendar during your business hours for personal assignement to work on small tasks that bring you joy or flow, deep work … or just breath
drink lot of water in the Office, with a large bottle ( 1 L) on your desk. it will force you to make small break and go to the loo
Having a kid may force you to finish early and pick him up at daycare. The morning drop force me to arrive after 9am at the office rather than 8am in my early years …
I’m going through exactly this situation right now. To give you some background, I changed job last year to take up a role that offered more independence and was more intellectually stimulating. I was looking for a new challenge and expected a more dynamic and stimulating job… but I’m experiencing the exact opposite. It’s a solitary job, not dynamic at all, and far too intellectual for my liking (I spend all my time writing, researching, thinking…). It’s a ‘bookworm’s’ job that doesn’t suit me at all. I’m bored to death. This is reflected in my performance, which, for the first time in my young career, is disastrous. On top of that, I have a boss who criticises me and highlights all my problems with a hidden agenda to encourage me to resign for my ‘own good’.
I am partly to blame for my poor performance and I recognise my shortcomings in this job; I can admit my mistakes and my faults, which my boss appreciates. Except that she hasn’t given me any good advice on how to improve and doesn’t take responsibility herself when she submits my work to others… In short, I’m in a situation where I don’t trust my boss, I feel isolated, and I get angry when I have to go into the office (when I’m working from home, I don’t have this problem). The result of all this is that I’ve noticed my mental health is deteriorating, and to counteract this I’m looking elsewhere and focusing more on activities outside work and short-term interests to avoid sinking into depression. Quitting my job would be a mistake, which is why I’m carrying on.
My advice to you: leave your job as soon as you find an opportunity elsewhere; do things outside work that take your mind off your working environment; and surround yourself with your loved ones, friends and family to enjoy good times together.
Pertinent to investing, I am looking for opinions on this situation: unhappy worker/unhappy bosses with potential for burnout/unemployment, difficult job market in CH, potential for global recession on the horizon. What to do? My gut instinct says “keep saving, keeping the money off the market, don’t sell anything”.
Your personal situation has changed, in particular, your need and ability to take risk have and the risks you are exposed to have too. It is worth a reassessment of your current investing strategy. My answer is to keep enough cash on the side to deal with the new circumstances and invest the rest according to my risk assessment.
For context, I’ve just handed my resignation letter, no job lined up (but the job market is still decent in my field) and a construction project that will require talking to the bank for a building credit in the coming times on the line. The reason for my resignation is related to the topic of this thread: my mental and physical health are deteriorating beyond a point where I can fight for myself and their recovery in my current work environment.
My stance is:
do count on unemployment benefits (including a penalty of roughly 3 months for voluntarily quitting my job so 3 months to cover fully with savings).
factor in a buffer for a few extra months of recovery (call it a sabbatical) if need be.
factor in big expense items / individual other investments that should happen within the year.
Substract the expected unemployment income from the expected amount of money required, add a 10% buffer, that’s the cash I want to have aside to finance my life, allowing for a low stress recovery environment. Invest the rest as per my investing strategy.
To note that being drained by your job, your mental health is likely to be far from its top form. It doesn’t need the extra hassle of worrying about the yoyos your assets are doing in whatever markets they’re invested. Be sure to pick an investing strategy that allows for peace of mind given your current circumstances.
Edit: related to FIRE. One may have thoughts that consuming and not earning pushes FIRE away and that a new high paying job must be found ASAP in order to allow for the final escape from the rat race. My own stance is that I am fully able to find solutions to whatever problem I am confronted to when I am in a situation where my brain can work and is rested so, for me:
Recovery first, do give yourself all the leeway necessary and invest in it.
FIRE pursuit later. It may not even be necessary anymore if I can find a working environment that allows for me to appreciate life while getting enough income/revenue to support myself and my dependents.
This is shit and makes me very angry, and I sincerely wish you it goes better for you and yours from now on. WTF are we doing with our lives and why TF is it like this nowadays? And I see it all over the board, from baristas to lawyers and execs as I said above in this thread.
My view is that FIRE is borderline impossible without 2 out of 3 of: 1) extremely high salary/appreciating stock options, 2) highly unusual savings rate (>50%) and severe personal and family and life budgeting austerity, 3) prolonged bull market. Joe Blow who invests in VT with 10-20% of their salary and gets a 5-7% above inflation/year will get a nice pillow to fall back on, no more, no less - the numbers don’t add up otherwise.
This is an interesting perspective, and one I didn’t expect to read in fact. So you’d continue investing from the unemployment benefits money? That’s quite confident, kudos!
What you describe makes a lot of sense, and the interesting part is that I already do almost everything you mentioned. I already have several advantages that many people do not have, and honestly that is one big reason why I managed to hold on for so long.
But I think that at a certain point even something that used to feel balanced starts becoming too heavy. What comes to mind is the classic metaphor of holding a glass full of water in your hand. For a few minutes it is not a problem. But the longer you hold it, the heavier it feels, until all you want is to put it down.
That is a bit how this feels to me now. The issue is no longer whether I have some good habits or some useful buffers in place. It is that the weight has been there for too long.
In my situation, personality does play a role into it (I always try to push further and can’t defend taking a break to myself or my employers for the sake of me).
On a broader level, I think it stems from time or returns objectives. Plan a task that takes 2 months over 2 months and 2 weeks so that the unplanned can also be dealt with and you can do it relatively comfortably without cutting edges. Plan it over 1 month and 2 weeks and you’ll be stressed all along, won’t optimise the decisions and end up comitting mistakes that you will have to correct with an non-existing time budget.
Same for financial objectives. Aim for 5% net margin and you may do it comfortably. Push it to 10% and you may end up always stripped for cash, cutting corners, angering your partner firms and clients and making things a whole lot worse.
In my field (civil engineering) and with my employers, I think part of it are unrealistic time and financial expectations from public clients due to political pressure, part of it is too high returns expectations by employers (or a lack of effectiveness when it comes to identifying how the money actually gets burnt instead of serving a useful purpose) and a lack of transmission of skills between generations of engineers (partly because there’s no budget allocated to it) which means projects are handled in a suboptimal way by people who lack proper support.
I would add inheritance. Very high savings rates and frugality is at the core of the original movement so that should be one of our main aims if we are serious about reaching FIRE.
Joe Blow may not reach complete financial independance but he may have more leeway to say FU to his boss and take time away to ponder on his life, find better work places or put changes in his career. I’m personally considering acting as a freelancer while searching for jobs I would actually appreciate. We’ll see how it goes.
I would have guessed it was the baseline consensus? But no, unemployment money goes toward expenses but having that money coming in increases the capital that can stay invested when the decision to quit the job (or the firering event) occurs.
Of course, if you are in such a position that unemployment money covers your expenses plus the expected penalties plus the extra cushion, then yes, part of it could be invested according to the plan.
That is very understandable, and I think many of us make these decisions with the best information we have at the time and with the best judgment we are capable of in that moment. Sometimes a role looks like the right next step on paper and only later you realize that the day to day reality is something very different.
One thought I would add is something an older retired person once told me. He had been through all the classic work situations over the years: high stress, ambitious colleagues, endless overtime, hard hits with little recognition. His view was that in the end, if you are an employee, one job or another will almost always come with problems of some kind, bigger or smaller, and that as long as you need to work, it often matters less than people think who you work for.
I do not fully agree with that view, because I think some environments are clearly better or worse than others. But there is also an obvious core of truth in it. And maybe that is also why many of us end up in spaces like this one, trying in one way or another to get our freedom back.
I don’t agree with that point of view either. In all my previous jobs and internships, I’ve worked with competent and demanding colleagues and managers, they were all supportive and solution-oriented. I never felt like I was at a dead end. Some days were better than others, of course. But at the end of the day, I was happy to be working and looking forward to going to work.
I realize that my desire to advance quickly in terms of salary was a big mistake. But I couldn’t have known that, and if I hadn’t tried this career, I probably would have regretted it just as much. Now I need to find a new job in a field that appeals to me more while trying to improve in my current role.
This thread is very interesting, in any case, and reading other people’s experiences and advice is a huge help!
It does not make me feel better that other people are in a similar situation, but exchanges like this do help me. There is something useful and grounding in seeing how others are thinking through it in a practical way.
I am also looking into how unemployment works in my case if I resign. If I understood it correctly, there is not only the penalty aspect, but also a gap before benefits start, so I have been trying to think through that carefully as well. I am considering that option too.
And I agree on the recovery buffer. A few sabbatical months would almost certainly give me more mental clarity than trying to force myself straight into the next thing while already drained.
I think exactly the same way. If I could find a healthier balance again, and recover the kind of energy and willingness I had years ago, it would not feel like such a burden anymore. At that point, the urgency to escape everything as fast as possible would probably be much lower.
Can you just make them fire you instead? This is why going full IDGAF makes sense: best case, you reduce workload and no fallout at work. If they fire you, you get full RAV.
But knowing myself, I think I would struggle with it. Partly because I would worry that it could somehow affect the next job, and partly because, for better or worse, I would still feel guilty about handling it that way. Even if the rational side of me can see the logic.
Yes, the older generations just took it for granted and just powered through it. I have long contemplated what made it that they seem (?) to have had a somewhat easier time than nowadays? Talking to bone fide boomers (ie my parents and their generation) they say things which sound stupid at first, like “we had enough, your generation is spoiled”. I wonder if there’s a kernel of truth there. Certainly they didn’t need to compete globally, or have electronic distractions 24/7/365, pensions were far more reliable.
I see RAV as a shock absorber, it’s not income, it has a clear expiration date. In my scenario planning I see myself minimizing expenses and gathering cash in case of unemployment, and then after finding a job probably needing 3-6 months at least for the shock to wear off before thinking about investing again. But not selling.
Companies that plan significant personnel reduction are incentivized to press employee to leave voluntarily to avoid negotiating a cantonal social plan.
They may resort to increasing stress with harsh reviews, increased workload, mandatory calls across wide time zones (East Asia and West Coast), increased travelling, punitive sprint ceremonials, etc…
@Mirager what your wife said. “the people that matter are those you see being with 20 years from now”. that’s probably the most important sentence in this whole thread.
I have been in a similar loop. Not the same situation, but the same pattern: throwing more hours at problems that do not get solved by hours, while the people at home get quieter and quieter because they have stopped asking when you will be done.
What eventually broke the loop for me was not a big decision. It was a small one. I sat down one evening and calculated exactly how many months we could keep going without my salary. Not some retirement projection, just the raw question: if I stop earning on Friday, when do things get tight?
The number was not exciting. But it replaced the endless “what if” spiral with something concrete. Suddenly it wasn not “I can’t afford to change anything” but “I have X months of breathing room to figure out the next step.”
That wont fix the job. But it might give you the clarity to actually make the decision your wife and your doctor are already hinting at.
That does sound very familiar, and yes, it feels almost textbook. I obviously cannot prove intent, but when you start seeing the same patterns all at once, it is hard not to wonder whether voluntary exits are being quietly encouraged.
At the end, either they “prove” bad performance (if you don’t try to match impossible workload) or they make employees realize that their health is not worth postponing the inevitable a month or two.
It built up gradually but at some point even the thought of work would send me into a terrible state - anxiety, apathy, tears. I didn’t even want to go to sleep because I knew I’d have to work again the next day. I just decided it couldn’t go on like that - my mental health is much more important, and there will always be another job.
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