.jpg)
How do you get over a constant fear of being fired?
I’ve been working since I was 16 years old and am now nearly 40. I’ve always had a persistent fear that I will get fired and my whole career future will be derailed. I’ve never been fired and have never been unemployed, but I have changed fields 3 times in hopes of finding a career or workplace that doesn’t give me this fear. I just don’t think I will ever trust any employer enough to have this fear go away because of the nature of capitalism.
Jobadvisor
That's a long time to carry this — over two decades of solid performance, never once fired, and the fear hasn't budged. That pattern itself is worth sitting with: if it were really about the employers or the field, changing jobs three times should have helped at least somewhat. The fact that it didn't suggests the fear isn't actually being generated by your workplaces — it's something you're bringing with you.
That doesn't mean your read on capitalism is wrong, exactly. Job security is genuinely conditional in most employment systems, and that's a fair thing to be clear-eyed about. But there's a difference between "job security has real limits" as a fact you hold lightly and "I will never trust this enough for the fear to go away" as something that's actively shaping your decisions and apparently your sense of safety in daily life. The first is just accurate. The second sounds like it's costing you something.
A few things worth untangling, if you're up for it:
Is the fear proportional to anything actually happening — feedback, performance reviews, company instability — or does it run at roughly the same intensity regardless of how things are objectively going? If it's the latter, that's a strong signal this is less about your jobs and more about how you process uncertainty in general, which sometimes traces back to things that predate your career entirely.
Also worth asking yourself honestly: when you've changed fields before, was it actually in service of finding more security, or did the fear just relocate with you each time because the underlying thing driving it never got addressed?
If this fear has been persistent enough to influence three career changes over two decades, that's a pattern more suited to working through with a therapist than reasoning your way out of alone — not because something is "wrong" with you, but because anxiety that's this entrenched and this disconnected from actual evidence usually needs more than logic to shift. Logic alone rarely beats a fear that was never built on logic in the first place.
What does the fear actually feel like day to day — is it background noise, or does it spike around specific things like meetings with your manager, slow weeks, or company news?
Should I stay with $140k FL remote vs ~$225k NYC?
Contemplating a job offer.
Current comp:
~$141k remote including bonus. Fully remote. Fully vested 5% 401k matching from the get go. Currently living in FL, and own a home. Need to stay near wife's work place so I can't move around, but it's pretty comfortable here. Wife's at $108k, including unlimited overtime potential since she's a RN. We've never needed to tap into unlimited overtime.
Offer:
~$215-$225k base salary hybrid role with the office located in NYC. Fully vested 6% 401k matching from the get go. $20k relocation bonus. 20-30% annual performance bonus (uncapped, but 20-30% is average). $55k LTI over 5 years. Would move first and wife moves with me in a few months. She'll likely be looking at $120-130k salary once she moves up. It's easy for RNs to find a job, after all.
We would look into renting the house out.
We've always wanted to get out of FL and this seems like it would be a great opportunity since they're paying to relocate us. It's also a step up from my current management role. No kids.
Cons - well, it's a big lifestyle change. Wife and I would likely be apart for a few months, which is always sad. Also, concerned about cost of living.
Two questions:
Should I stay in FL or should I go? What would you do?
Jobadvisor
The math on paper looks like a no-brainer for the NYC offer, but the real question is whether NYC's cost of living eats that gap, and it mostly does — not entirely.
Quick gut check on the comp: $225k base plus a realistic 25% bonus (~$56k) puts you around $280k before the LTI vests, versus $141k now. That's roughly double. Even after NYC taxes (NY state + NYC city tax stack on top of federal, easily 8-10% combined extra versus FL's zero state income tax) and a higher cost base, you're likely net ahead by a meaningful margin, especially once your wife is also earning $120-130k there instead of $108k. Two incomes both went up.
The two real costs aren't in the comp comparison, though:
Housing is the big one. FL ownership with no mortgage stress vs NYC hybrid (meaning you likely need to live close enough to commute, not Westchester-exurb close) is the actual lifestyle hit. Renting out your FL house is smart, but run the numbers on whether that rent covers your mortgage/insurance/taxes there, because Florida insurance costs have gotten brutal and that could eat into what you assumed was a clean financial buffer. If it's roughly breakeven or better, that derisks the move a lot since you're not burning the home equity, just sitting on it.
The second cost is the months apart from your wife, which you flagged as "always sad" — worth not minimizing. A few months is finite and a known endpoint, which makes it very different from an open-ended long-distance situation. Most couples can do a defined few months if there's a clear light at the end of it, but it's fair to ask yourselves honestly whether "a few months" has a real date attached or whether it's vague enough to drift.
On the "should I stay or go" question itself: you said you've always wanted to leave FL, this is a role with more scope and visibility, the company is paying to make the move happen, and your spouse can re-credential easily as an RN. That's about as low-friction as a big relocation gets. The biggest real risk isn't compensation, it's hybrid-NYC burnout (commute + cost + intensity of a higher-stakes role) replacing the comfort you have now. Worth asking the hiring manager what hybrid actually means in practice (2 days a week? 4?) since that changes both your commute calculus and how far out you could reasonably live.
If you want, I can run an actual side-by-side budget with NYC tax brackets, estimated rent in a few boroughs/commuter towns, and what your FL rental income would likely cover, so you have real numbers instead of estimates.
What are some less obvious signs of a toxic workplace?
I've been at my current job for just over 12 months. It's been stressful from day 1 and going on for so long that I can't really tell anymore if the environment is the problem or whether I am.
On the surface, the workplace doesn't seem very toxic. My colleagues are nice people and I like most of them. Nobody yells, bullies, or steals my credit. No one ever said "we're all family here", the turnover is low-normal, and my manager ends every 1:1 with "thanks for everything you do."
But in the day-to-day, I feel like I'm going insane. Here are some examples:
• My manager will tell me to do something in the tone of "this is what you really should do" and then when I come back a few days later she'll go "no, why would you do that?"
• She also micromanages a lot. Today, she asked me to draft emails on behalf of our boss, kept adding small changes, and then told me to send it to her for review before it goes out, which made me think she should have just written it herself.
• She calls out every small error, of which I'm making a lot of them now, which is something that didn't used to happen in my old job. Every time her name pops up on my screen, I shrink a little inside, expecting to have done something wrong.
• When I mentioned my workload - 30+ big deliverables per year compared to ~6 of my co-workers - she said the comparison wouldn't really hold up. I've cried in front of her and our director once, saying how exhausted I am. They didn't care.
This also seems to be the spirit on a structural level: long hours and work over the weekends are normal for most. We are expected to use our phones for work but don't get any company phones, so work constantly bleeds into our personal lives. The strange thing is - no one seems to mind that much?! Everyone is "passionate" about the work, and whilst I do care, my life doesn't revolve around it.
I've grown professionally, for sure. But it's taken a toll: I feel like I can no longer trust my own judgement and second- guess every little thing I do. I've started over-explaining and over-communicating everything I do, because nobody trusts my judgment.
Or maybe it's just a me problem, and I'm just not cut out for a demanding job with high expectations?
If you found yourself in a toxic job, how were you able to tell? What were the signs?
And before you say it, I know I've got to get myself out of there!!
Jobadvisor
What you're describing has a name in organizational psychology: moving goalposts combined with contradictory instructions is a recognized driver of what's sometimes called "learned helplessness" in workplace settings, and it's genuinely more corrosive than the loud, obvious stuff because it's deniable. Nobody yelled at you, so on paper nothing happened. But "do this" followed by "why would you do that" isn't feedback, it's a no-win setup, and your brain registering "I can't trust my own judgment" isn't a flaw in you, it's the correct adaptive response to genuinely unpredictable reinforcement. That's not a you-problem. That's a known psychological effect of being given inconsistent signals from someone who controls your evaluation.
A few other less obvious signs worth naming, since you asked:
The 30-vs-6 deliverables discrepancy that gets waved away with "the comparison wouldn't hold up" is a big one. When workload is wildly uneven and the person with power to fix it won't even validate that it's uneven, that's not a neutral oversight, that's a structural choice to let one person absorb the slack.
The phone thing is subtler than it sounds. Being expected to be reachable without a company device isn't just inconvenient, it's a way of making the boundary between work and not-work functionally nonexistent while keeping plausible deniability ("we never said you have to answer"). Workplaces that genuinely respect off-hours either give you a separate device or explicitly don't expect responses after hours, in writing.
Your manager rewriting your boss's email phrase by phrase and then asking you to send it for her review of your draft is a closed loop that produces nothing except making you feel incompetent. That's not oversight, it's theater that costs you confidence for no organizational benefit.
And the one I'd flag most: everyone else seeming fine with it. That's not actually evidence the environment is healthy, it's often evidence of a strong cultural norm that's been normalized over time, sometimes called "passionate" workaholism cultures, where the expectation of overwork gets relabeled as enthusiasm so nobody examines whether it's sustainable. The people who'd object either left already (hence "low-normal" turnover, which might mean steady quiet attrition of exactly the people who'd push back) or have adjusted their baseline. You being the one who still notices something's wrong isn't a defect, it might mean you haven't fully acclimated to a norm that was unhealthy to begin with.
The crying-in-front-of-your-director-and-getting-no-real-response is, I'll be honest, the most concrete data point here. That's not subtle anymore. A reasonable manager and director, faced with an employee in visible distress over workload, do something: redistribute work, extend a deadline, follow up later. "They didn't care" in your own words is worth taking at face value rather than explaining away.
You already know you need out, so I won't belabor that. But it might help to reframe what's happening internally: you're not failing to handle a demanding job, you're operating under a contradictory reward structure that would erode anyone's confidence over time, and the fact that you're still able to articulate all this clearly, even from inside it, suggests your judgment is more intact than the job's making you feel.
What can I transition to if I'm completely bored of the corporate world at 37 years old?
I'm 37 and I'm honestly wondering if I'm having some kind of career crisis.
I've worked in web marketing since 2014. I never really had a passion for it. I kind of fell into it after dropping out of college and landing an internship. I have an associate's degree, but no bachelor's.
Over the last four years I've job hopped into more senior roles, so financially I'm in the best position I've ever been. The problem is that I just don't care about the work anymore.
I never wake up excited about a project. When someone asks how work is going, my answer is always, "It's good," and that's the end of the conversation. I don't hate my job. I just don't feel anything about it.
Lately it's gotten worse because so much of my job revolves around AI. I'm not anti-AI at all. I've used it heavily for years. But it used to be a tool that helped me work faster. Now management wants us measuring success by how well we use AI, building reusable agents, and essentially creating systems that automate parts of our own jobs. I know that's where the industry is going, but I find it incredibly boring. I like being an individual contributor. I don't get excited about spending my days building AI workflows.
I honestly don't know if I can do this for another 20+ years until retirement.
The weird part is I think I'd genuinely be happier working at a coffee shop or my local library. Helping people, talking to regulars, actually interacting with other humans. I've worked remotely for the last four years, so most days I have almost no interaction with adults outside of my wife. I also don't really have hobbies outside of raising my two young kids (4 and 2), so work takes up a huge part of my identity.
At the same time, I'm terrified that the grass isn't greener. I have a wife, two kids, and I'm the one providing health insurance, so I'm not about to quit my job without a plan. I know I need a stable career.
Part of me wonders if I just need an office job again, but I also think I'd probably regret giving up the flexibility and work-life balance just to make small talk in the break room. So I don't think that's really the answer either.
Has anyone else gone through something like this? Did you actually change careers, or did you realize the problem wasn't your career at all? I'm trying to figure out whether I need a different job, a different career, or just a different perspective. I've searched a few threads similar ot this and some people have mentioned accounting/bookkeeping. I do like math and wonder if "problem solving" all day would be more exciting then running SEO and building landing pages and tracking marketing metrics.
Jobadvisor
The detail that stands out most isn't the AI fatigue or the marketing burnout, it's "I think work takes up a huge part of my identity" sitting right next to "I don't really have hobbies outside of raising my kids." That combination is worth sitting with before deciding career vs. job vs. perspective, because it changes what the actual problem might be.
Here's the thing about the coffee shop fantasy: it's probably not really about coffee, it's about craving human contact and tangible, immediate feedback after four years of remote work where your main adult interaction is your wife. That's a real and legitimate need, but it's also a need that doesn't require torching your income, your health insurance, and your stability to meet. People sometimes mistake "I want a different kind of day" for "I want a different career," and those are solvable in very different ways. Before assuming you need to become a bookkeeper or a barista, it's worth asking what a remote senior marketer's life could look like with deliberate, structural changes: a coworking space two or three days a week, a standing lunch with a friend, a hobby that puts you around people on a regular cadence. Those are lower-risk experiments than a career change, and if they actually move the needle on how you feel, that tells you the diagnosis was loneliness and disconnection, not marketing itself.
The AI piece is a separate and probably more durable problem. You're not vague about it: you like being an individual contributor doing the work, not the person architecting systems that automate the work away. That's a legitimate professional preference, and it's worth taking seriously rather than assuming you just need to get over it, because "the industry is moving this direction" doesn't obligate you to move with it if it's making you miserable. There are absolutely corners of marketing, and adjacent fields, that stay more hands-on and less meta for longer: brand and creative strategy, certain agency or freelance arrangements where you're closer to execution, smaller companies that haven't restructured roles around AI orchestration yet. None of those are forever-proof, but they buy you years, not days.
On accounting and bookkeeping specifically: liking math and liking "problem solving all day" are necessary but not sufficient signals. Bookkeeping in particular is repetitive, detail-heavy, deadline-driven work, often solitary, often more procedural than puzzle-like day to day. If what you actually crave is structure, clarity of right-and-wrong, and a clean stopping point to your work each day (as opposed to marketing's nebulous "did this campaign really work" ambiguity), that instinct might be sound. But it's worth testing cheaply before committing, talking to two or three actual bookkeepers or accountants about what a normal Tuesday looks like, maybe doing a basic course or certification on the side, before you assume the grass is greener there specifically.
The honest version of your three options: it's rarely purely "different job" or purely "different perspective," it's almost always a mix, and the way to find the mix is to run small experiments instead of trying to reason your way to the answer in your head. Change the structure of your days first (in-person time, a hobby with social contact, maybe even pushing back on the AI-systems part of your role explicitly with your manager) and see how much of the numbness lifts. Whatever's left after that is the real signal about whether it's the field itself you need to leave.
My current job will pay me to go to college as long as I choose between six degrees. Which of these should I choose if I want a desk job that wont be too difficult breaking into?
Hi. I currently work at Wal-mart, and they have a program that allows you to go back to school as long as its one of the degrees that they cover. My biggest requirement is that I can sit all day and that I can actually find a job when I graduate, but I have no idea what I'm doing or what would be best. Right now I'm leaning toward Supply Chain Management. I'm worried Computer Science is oversatured, industrial engineering would be too physically demanding for me, and the Business ones would have me end up in sales and I'm not sure I'm extroverted or persuasive enough to be in sales. But maybe I'm overlooking something - perhaps the business degrees are more adaptive than I imagine them being? Here are the possible degrees;
BS Business Administration – SNHU
BS Business Management & Leadership – Bellevue University
BS Computer Science – SNHU
BS Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering – Indiana Tech
BS Supply Chain, Trans, Logistics – Bellevue University
BSBA in Supply Chain Management – University of Arkansas
Let me know what you think! Pros and cons would be nice.
Jobadvisor
Your instinct to rule out industrial engineering on physical-demand grounds and lean toward supply chain is reasonable, but a couple of your other assumptions are worth re-examining before you commit, since this is a multi-year decision.
On computer science: "oversaturated" is true at the entry level for a specific subset, new grads chasing FAANG-style software engineering roles in a brutal market right now. But CS is a broad degree that opens doors well beyond competitive SWE roles: business analyst, IT support escalating into systems administration, QA, data analyst, technical project coordination. If your actual goal is "desk job, not too hard to break into," a CS degree without a specific elite-tier ambition still tends to outperform most business degrees in starting salary and breadth of entry points, precisely because so many adjacent roles will take a CS grad even if they don't land a pure dev job. The caveat is that CS coursework itself is harder and more demanding than the other five options on your list, lots of math, lots of programming logic, so if you're not at least somewhat drawn to that kind of problem-solving, it could be a rough multi-year slog regardless of the payoff.
On the business degrees defaulting to sales: that's a common assumption but not really accurate. A general Business Administration or Management & Leadership degree is one of the most flexible credentials that exists precisely because it's vague, it can lead to operations, project coordination, HR, administration, account management (which is relationship-based but not cold-call sales), or just serve as the "box-checking" bachelor's degree that lets you clear the screening filter for countless office jobs that don't care which business degree you have. The tradeoff is that the degree's flexibility is also its weakness: it doesn't signal a specific skill the way a more targeted degree does, so without internships or relevant work experience layered on top, it can be a generic credential competing against a lot of other generic credentials.
Your lean toward Supply Chain Management is probably the strongest pick on the list for your stated criteria, and here's why specifically: it's a more targeted degree than generic business, but not nearly as technical or competitive as CS, the field has consistent, steady demand because every company that moves physical goods needs supply chain people, it's not glamorous enough to be oversaturated the way CS or finance are, and the day-to-day roles, procurement, logistics coordination, inventory planning, demand forecasting, are overwhelmingly desk-based and analytical, not physical or sales-heavy. The University of Arkansas BSBA in Supply Chain Management in particular carries more brand recognition in supply chain specifically than Bellevue's version, Arkansas has one of the most established supply chain programs in the country given its proximity to Walmart's own headquarters and logistics ecosystem, so that may genuinely be the most strategically useful credential of the six, especially given who's paying for it.
If you want a structured way to land on a final answer rather than just my read of it, I can lay out a few questions to help you weigh CS versus supply chain specifically, since those seem like your two real contenders.