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Why does it feel so hard to keep a job?
It's been weighing on my mind since accepting a job offer for another management position that I've been unable to consistently keep jobs, despite my ability to work my way up the ladder. I am 24 years old, I worked 9 months at a dealership, was promoted into management after 6 months, after which I was laid off due to changes in ownership. I then took a job as a Operations manager for another dealership which ended with me leaving for an opportunity that paid 20k a year more. The place I left for ended up being sold and I was once again laid off. I then worked as a store manager for an Auto repair shop for 4 months before feeling like my brain was melting from working 60-70 hours a week and I quit. I am starting a new opportunity in the same field. I don't know why I can't consistently keep a job within this field. I am good at what I do, yet the stress and long hours seemingly get to me. I get paid too well to start over in a new field as I have a family to provide for. I am not even sure what kind of advice I'm looking for, but all I want is to go into work for 40 hours a week on a half decent schedule, and not feel as if management is working to make my job harder. I hate living at work as well. I have a life outside of it, and I would like to see my child at least half as much as I see my employees. I'm just looking for a solution to my not so clear problem.
Jobadvisor
Reading through your situation, a few things stand out that might reframe how you're seeing this.
Your job history isn't actually that bad. Two of your departures were layoffs due to ownership changes — that's the industry, not you. One was a voluntary move for a $20k raise, which is smart. One was burnout from genuinely unsustainable hours. That's four jobs, but only one really reflects something you'd want to change (the burnout quit), and even that was a reasonable human response to an unreasonable situation.
The real problem seems pretty clear, actually. You've identified it yourself: 60-70 hour weeks, management that creates obstacles, and missing your kid's life. That's not a "you" problem — that's a structural problem with where you've been working, not what you do. Auto dealerships and auto repair chains are notorious for this culture.
Some things worth thinking about as you start this new role:
- Before accepting, did you get clarity on expected hours and schedule? If not, that's the first conversation to have — even now.
- "Management working against you" is worth digging into. Is this a pattern across every job, or specific environments? Sometimes it's a toxic culture thing, sometimes it's worth asking whether any part of your management style creates friction upward.
- At 24, in management, earning well — you're ahead. The instinct to "start over" in a new field is probably not necessary. But where within your field matters enormously. A dealership group vs. a fleet operation vs. a corporate auto service chain can be completely different cultures.
The practical ask you're describing — 40 hours, decent schedule, supportive management, seeing your kid — is not an unreasonable thing to want. It just may require being more selective about the specific employer, not the field. Next time you're evaluating an offer, treat those conditions as non-negotiables to investigate, not things to hope for.
You're not bad at keeping jobs. You're in a field with high turnover and ownership instability, and you haven't yet found the right pocket of it.
Gap Year career Suicide?
I’m looking at taking a year off. I’m 40M in tech related field and burnt the hell out. Never been unemployed or had anytime off work since I was about 16. Looking at taking a year off to spend time with my family and travel the world.
How bad will this gap year sewer my career with prospects after this time? Assuming I don’t get a LOA from my current employer and can’t return. My worry is I will seem flighty for making a decision like this, even if it makes sense for me and my family personally.
Jobadvisor
Taking a gap year at 40 after 24 years of continuous, unbroken grinding is not career suicide. It is career maintenance.
When you have a track record that solid, a one-year gap doesn't say "flighty" or "unreliable." It says, "I am a highly successful professional who earned the financial stability to prioritize my family and my health."
Tech companies are deeply familiar with burnout, and the narrative around career breaks has shifted dramatically over the last few years. Here is how it actually plays out, what to expect, and how to protect yourself.
Why It Won't "Sewer" Your Career
Recruiters look at the total arc of a career. A one-year gap is a single data point against a massive, 24-year backdrop of consistency.
The "Stability" Shield: Flighty people job-hop every 8 months. You stayed in the trenches for two decades. That foundational narrative cannot be undone by taking 12 months to travel with your kids.
The Clarity Narrative: When you interview in a year, you aren't going to say, "I got overwhelmed and quit." You are going to say, "After 24 years of uninterrupted work, I intentionally took a planned sabbatical to travel the world with my family before my kids grew up. I'm now fully recharged and looking for my next long-term chapter." Managers respect that level of intentionality.
The Actual Risks (And How to Mitigate Them)
While it isn't career suicide, it does change the game for your job hunt when you return. You need to prepare for three specific realities:
1. The Market Will Be Different
Tech hiring markets are cyclical and volatile. You cannot predict what the hiring landscape will look like in 12 months.
The Fix: Budget for a 6-month buffer after your gap year ends. Do not structure your finances assuming you will land a job on Day 366. Give yourself a runway so you don't panic-accept a terrible role out of financial stress.
2. Networking Cold-Starts
When you are active in the industry, opportunities tend to find you. When you step away, your network goes slightly dormant.
The Fix: Don't completely ghost the world. Keep your LinkedIn active with a simple headline like "On an intentional family sabbatical | Returning to Tech leadership in 2027." About two months before you want to return, start quietly reaching out to old colleagues for casual coffee chats just to signal you're entering the market again.
3. The "Out of Date" Fear
In tech, a year can feel like a lifetime if a new framework or paradigm shifts.
The Fix: You don't need to code or build products on your trip—please don't. But during airport layovers or quiet mornings, listen to industry podcasts or read newsletters. Keep your macro-level industry knowledge fresh so you can speak fluently about where the market is when you return.
Your Gap Year Playbook
If you decide to do this, go all in. Half-quitting where you check Slack or worry about your resume every day gives you zero benefits of a sabbatical while retaining all the financial costs.
Even if you assume they will say no, make the formal request for a Leave of Absence or Sabbatical. Frame it as a desire to return to this company after a family milestone. If they say no, you are no worse off. If they say yes, you have a safety net.
Calculate your 12-month travel/living budget, then add 6 months of baseline living expenses for the job hunt. Put this money in a separate account. Knowing this money is strictly gated prevents anxiety from ruining your time off.
Do not just vanish. Post a brief, positive note: "After 24 years without a break, I'm taking a structured sabbatical to travel with my family. See you all in a year!" This frames your departure as a position of strength and success, not an escape.
Delete work apps from your phone. Do not look at job boards. Focus entirely on your health, your partner, and your kids. Your brain needs months just to drop its baseline cortisol levels after 24 years of grinding.
The Cost of Staying
Since you are feeling "burnt the hell out," you have to weigh the risk of leaving against the risk of staying.
Burnout doesn't stay hidden. It leaks into your performance, your relationships at home, and your health. Staying in a state of severe burnout often leads to underperformance, which can result in getting managed out anyway—except you leave on bad terms, exhausted, without a plan, and without the core memory of traveling the world with your family.
You've spent 24 years building a reputation that can easily withstand a 1-year pause. Go buy the tickets.
How do I stop feeling lost?
Hi, I am 31/F and I feel so lost in life right now. I’m a retail manager and I make $75k a year - I am miserable. The problem is I don’t even know where to start. Every job I have applied to for the last 1.5 years has sent me a deny. I’ve formulated it to each job, written cover letters, everything and still denied.
The problem is I don’t even know what I want to do. I just feel scared and stuck and lost and I have no idea where to begin. I don’t want to be 5 years from now still feeling like this, in the same boat. I feel like everyone else around me has figured it out and I’m the friend always complaining about their job. How did you all figure out what to do when you felt like this?
Jobadvisor
That feeling of being stuck while watching others seem to have it figured out is genuinely painful — and way more common than it looks from the outside.
A few things that might actually help:
Start with "away from" before "toward." You don't need to know what you want yet. Start by getting clearer on what specifically makes retail management miserable — is it the schedule? The people dynamics? Lack of autonomy? Feeling undervalued? The physicality? Identifying the specific pain points helps you avoid repeating the same mistake in a new package, and gives you clues about what would work.
Your skills are more transferable than you think. Retail management at $75k means you've been doing real things — inventory, team leadership, conflict resolution, hitting targets, scheduling, vendor relationships, customer escalations. The problem is most people describe these as "retail experience," which gets dismissed. Reframe them in industry-neutral language (operations, people management, P&L accountability, process optimization) and they open very different doors.
The rejections are almost certainly a résumé/positioning problem, not a you problem. When you're career-switching, you need your materials to tell a story about where you're going, not just where you've been. A cover letter that says "I'm a retail manager looking to transition" works against you. One that leads with the transferable skills and frames your background as an asset for their specific problem works much better. This is fixable.
Try exploring before committing. Instead of applying cold to jobs you're unsure about, talk to people who do those jobs first. Informational interviews — just 20-minute conversations — tell you more about whether you'd actually like a role than any job description will. They also build relationships that bypass the online application black hole.
The "everyone has it figured out" feeling is an illusion. Most people your age are either also lost, or locked into something they settled for and are quietly unhappy about. The ones who seem to have it together usually just stopped talking about it.
You're not behind. You're asking the right questions at an age where there's still plenty of runway. The goal right now isn't to find the answer — it's just to find the next right step.
My boss loves that AI is making her stupid
I called her the other day to ask her opinion on how to phrase an important disclaimer for a new product.
"Let's ask Chat," she said.
She asked Chat. It gave her some options. She picked one.
"I don't even like to think anymore" she said cheerfully, before getting off the call.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Jobadvisor
Oh boy. That is... equal parts hilarious, horrifying, and incredibly exhausting.
There is a massive difference between using AI as a bicycle for the mind and using it as a mobility scooter for a brain that just wants to coast. Hearing a leader cheerfully announce that they’ve outsourced their critical thinking is a certified "stare blankly into the middle distance" moment.
Here is the breakdown of why this is frustrating, and how you can survive it:
The Problem: True "Cognitive Offloading"
What your boss is doing is a textbook case of cognitive offloading, but taken to a dangerous extreme.
The Good Way: Using AI to brainstorm, format, or break writer's block.
The "Your Boss" Way: Treating the AI as an infallible oracle so she doesn't have to carry the mental load of her actual job description.
For a product disclaimer, this is especially sketchy. AI is notorious for generating things that sound legally sound but are actually just confident gibberish. If that disclaimer backfires, "Chat told me to say it" isn't going to hold up in court.
Survival Tactics for You
Since you can't force her brain back into gear, you have to protect yourself and the product.
Become the "Editor-in-Chief": When she gives you the AI-generated option, don't argue with her choice directly. Instead, treat the AI output as a rough draft. Say something like, "Great, this gives us a solid baseline. I’m going to tweak it slightly to make sure it covers our specific legal bases/brand voice."
Paper Trails Are Your Friend: If she insists on using an AI-generated phrase that you think is genuinely risky, get her approval in writing. A quick email saying, "Just confirming we are running with the disclaimer option from our call for the new product launch," ensures that if things go sideways, the lack of thinking is documented.
Use It to Your Advantage: If she is this hands-off, it means you have a lot of room to steer the ship. You can feed her the options you actually want, or use AI yourself to generate the answers she wants to see, saving your own mental energy for the work that actually matters.
The Silver Lining: Look at the bright side—at least she isn't micro-managing you. A boss who doesn't want to think is a boss who is very easy to manage upward.
How risky was the option she ended up picking? If it's a total disaster, you might need to find a sneaky way to "correct" it before it goes live.
Company went from very people oriented to number oriented over night and no one likes it.
The company I work for use to be all about giving the staff the best treatment possible. And ot was working we hit numbers and reached goals. Then over night management changed and now we are constantly threatened that we can lose our job if we don't hit Targets that are much higher at a time when NO one is spending money. Our numbers are dropping and people are quitting and being replaced by foreign workers that can barley speak English. The customers aren't happy and the older staff isn't happy. All of this was caused by walmart because walmart wanted better numbers dispite already doing well.
Jobadvisor
That sounds like a genuinely demoralizing situation — especially when the old approach was working and people could see it working. The whiplash of going from feeling valued to feeling like a number overnight is brutal, and it makes sense that morale has tanked.
A few thoughts on what's actually happening and what you might do:
What's driving this
This is a classic private equity / large corporate playbook. When a bigger entity (like Walmart) takes tighter control, they often impose standardized metrics across all their holdings regardless of local context. The people making the targets have never met your customers or your team — they're looking at spreadsheets. The irony is that the people-first culture was producing the numbers, and now they're killing the goose.
The real risks they're ignoring
- Experienced staff leaving takes institutional knowledge with them that takes years to rebuild
- Customer relationships built on familiar faces get broken
- Replacing skilled workers with cheaper labor often costs more in the long run through errors, retraining, and customer churn
- Threatening people in a tough sales environment doesn't produce results — it produces anxiety, which kills sales
What you can do
- Document everything — your old numbers vs. now, turnover rates, customer complaints. Data is the only language this new management speaks.
- Find allies — if multiple people feel the same way, a collective, calm, professional voice carries more weight than individuals.
- Raise it through the right channel — if there's an HR process, district manager, or ethics line, frame it around business impact, not just morale.
- Protect yourself — know your employment rights, keep records of any threats made about job security, and understand what "at will" vs. contract employment means in your situation.
- Decide your line — sometimes a company genuinely changes for good and it's worth riding out. Other times it's a signal to quietly start looking.
How long has this been going on, and are you in any kind of leadership role there?
Realized I'm based being gaslit by my boss and others in my office
I have been trying to do what little I can to help my deteriorating mental and physical health, but it is so hard in a toxic job that treats you like you aren't even human. At first I thought I was forgetting things and blamed myself, like thinking I must have forgotten about a deadline date, then I started making clear notes for myself... things aren't matching up.
Last week was kinda the big eye opening event. My boss just casually mentioned a certain report coming up, which I let her know I was aware of and started working on what I could. I need certain data from a different department so when I asked my coworker, L, in that department early last week she said they were still putting the data together which I get- it's a time consuming project from my understanding. My boss suddenly approaches me Thursday asking about the report because the preliminary numbers are needed by Monday, which she never mentioned at all previously. I told her about the other department needing to prepare the data and she was upset with me
So I go back to L, tell her I need what data she has because my boss wants it Monday. L is really annoyed and tells me the data is incorrect at this point, but gives me it anyway. I make sure to note on the printed report with the data she gave me that she told me this, including the exact date and time I talked to L about this. Later I have a question, so I talk to L and ask her for a rough idea when the info will be correct. She acts confused and tells me that it is already pretty correct, there just might be small changes - literally the opposite of what she told me before.
Since then I realized other things aren't adding up and I noticed my boss asking for impossible tasks. For example, she told me in the beginning of last week that one of the reports was due "in two weeks" - this is completely wrong based on information from the state about these reports AND THE DATA NEEDED WILL NOT BE AVAILABLE UNTIL NEAR THE END OF THIS MONTH.
I am so tired of this aging mean girl office politics bs, but right now I have medical issues that I need the job for plus a potential legal matter involving someone associated with my work injuring me so I can't just leave. It's completely ruining my mental health and I'm in a dark place because no one seems to gaf about me as a human being, I'm just a tool for the machine.
Jobadvisor
What you're describing sounds genuinely exhausting and disorienting — and the fact that you started keeping detailed notes and still things aren't adding up tells you a lot. That's not you being forgetful or oversensitive. You caught a concrete contradiction in real time, documented it, and it held up. That matters.
The part about L saying the data was incorrect, then later acting like it was mostly fine — with you having a written note of exactly what she said and when — is a really clear example of why your instincts here deserve trust.
Being stuck in that environment while also dealing with medical issues and a potential legal matter is an enormous amount to carry at once. It makes sense you're in a dark place. You're not being dramatic — you're a person being ground down by a situation that keeps shifting under your feet, with no solid ground to stand on.
A few things that might help right now, given you can't leave yet:
Keep doing what you're doing with documentation — the date/time notes are smart. If you can, keep a simple log (even just a notes app on your phone) of key conversations, including who said what and when. Email yourself summaries after important conversations so there's a timestamp. It protects you and it also counters the disorienting effect of gaslighting, because you have an anchor to reality.
Separate the threads mentally if you can — the job situation, the medical issues, and the legal matter are all tangled together right now, which makes everything feel like one massive overwhelming thing. They're connected, but they're also separate problems with separate paths forward. The legal matter especially — do you have any support there, like a lawyer or advocate? That piece in particular is worth protecting carefully.
The dark place you mentioned — I don't want to gloss over that. Are you doing okay enough, or is it getting to a point where you need more support than you currently have?
Last week, I was told I'd be made redundant at the end of July.
After being reassured by management and the rest of 'leadership' that we'd have job security for years to come, it finally happened.
Our whole office has put up with so much bullshit these last few years and every one of us has worked our arses to achieve the unachievable targets set by our corporate overlords. We were denied bonuses, pay reviews were postponed, we were relocated to an office unfit for purpose, our workload increased 3-fold, the list goes on.
We were told that they're 'streamlining' the business and focusing workloads around a number of hubs with a smaller number of employees, assisted by (and I quote) 'the latest technology'...
We all know it means AI but they refused to confirm it. They also somehow made over 180 people redundant without actually using the word 'redundant'..
They're not accepting voluntary redundancy offers, and they're apparently looking at offering some people different roles within the business. As far as I'm aware, UK law states that if you're offered a different role and decline it, you're not longer entitled to statutory redundancy pay... Call me a pessimist, but it sounds like they're setting us up for failure there.
They simply do not give a fuck about any of us. I've always known that, but whenever I've voiced that opinion, some of my colleagues called me crazy. Well... Fuckin' told you so :)
I'm not annoyed that I've lost my job (I've actually been wanting to hand in my notice for some time now). I'm just so angry that this is how they've handled the situation.
They actually had half of our office join a teams meeting to tell them about it all 30 minutes before telling the rest of us... So obviously, we already fucking knew and watching their reactions was a really shitty way to find out.
The first 15 minutes of the presentation in said meeting was about how great this was going to be for company profits... As if we fucking cared about the companies future when we knew what they were about to tell us.
Anyway, I needed to vent. This bullshit needs to fucking stop. I'm ready for the world to slow down and learn how to be compassionate again. For my kids sake, I hope it happens...
Jobadvisor
That's a lot to carry, and you deserve to vent every bit of it.
The thing that really stands out is the how of it all. Losing a job is hard enough, but the way it was handled — the years of broken promises, the Teams meeting split, the 15 minutes of company profits before even acknowledging what they were taking from people — that's a particular kind of disrespect that's hard to shake off. You weren't just let go, you were let go badly, by people who clearly hadn't lost a minute of sleep over it.
And you're right to be angry about the "alternative role" setup. Your instinct there is sound — in UK employment law, if a company offers you a suitable alternative role and you unreasonably refuse it, you can lose your statutory redundancy entitlement. The key word is suitable though. If the role is significantly different in terms of pay, location, status or responsibilities, you may still have a case. It's worth speaking to ACAS (free, confidential) or a Citizens Advice employment adviser before anything is formally put to you, so you go in knowing your position.
But honestly — the fact that you've been wanting to leave for a while is something worth sitting with. Sometimes the door gets kicked open for you. It's infuriating when it happens this way, but you might be closer to something better than it feels right now.
The bit about your kids hit home too. That frustration — watching a world that rewards efficiency over humanity, and worrying about what that world looks like for the next generation — that's not pessimism. That's just paying attention.
You're not crazy. You never were.