Comment by travisgriggs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by travisgriggs | Hacker News Reader

What will the author blog in 5 years?

I am noticing a (darkish?) pattern in these recurring “I transitioned jobs” reports. Worryingly, they represent many of the words I imagine myself writing if I were again a blogger.

It’s basically the honeymoon/wanderlust cycle. Person gets job. It is a dream job. It is described as a dream job because of reasons a1, b1, and c1. Delta t passes. Things have changed. Because of reasons x1, y1, and z1, job is no longer a good dream job. It’s now a bad dream/nightmare job. Person has awakened now, and for reasons, a2, b2, and c2 is living a new dream. Blink, flinch, repeat.

The nagging suspicion is that while things change, they don’t so much actually. They shift around. What does change is how we come to see things. At one point, we convince ourselves things are awesome. Later we believe it’s not. Which is the real truth we ought to accept? It’s like trying to measure the one way speed of light. You can’t, just the sum of the round trip.

So do we make the assumption that somewhere in the middle of this good-to-bad cycle is the reality? Or suspect it was always that bad, we were just able to initially gaslight ourselves? Or perhaps that it was and still is good, we’ve just let the negatives creep in and take over?

Some would philosophize that all happiness is an illusion. Or a choice. Or whatever.

But what frustrates me about this (having been through this cycle 3-4 times now), is that it is not a universal life experience. I have relationships with family, friends, and various institutions that grow stronger and stronger over time. They do NOT loop like work relationships do. Is there something inherit in work relationships that makes this loop inevitable? Do all experience it, or only a certain mindset of persons? Are there cases where this loop is broken, but they just rare enough, you don’t hear about them? Should I despair or hope?

The question “what is my ideal job?” doesn’t always have to have the same answer. We learn. We react. We have new experiences, which become routine, then we seek novelty again. Or, convince ourselves that it’s a really good deal and stick around.

Relationships are different though. I see work as primarily transactional, whereas personal relationships work best when they aren’t. In a friendship it’s common for both people to grow in the same direction, while a company is inflexible and doesn’t respond to your individual growth so it’s more likely that you’ll “grow apart.”

I think the difference is that work is typically much more stressful and difficult than relationships with friends and family.

I suspect that exposure to constant stress at work causes us to have negative feelings over time (burnout), and the easiest way to reset the emotional clock is to get a different job working on something else.

But some people appear to be highly resistant to burnout, and I’m not sure why. I’d definitely like to learn more about it, though.

> work is typically much more stressful and difficult than relationships with friends and family

You should meet my mother

Here's my story:

I've had 3 "dream jobs." I only regret joining one of them and it basically followed the pattern you describe, and I think I just narrowly avoided entering into this cycle in my most recent job search. In the last year, I had multiple opportunities to continue the cycle and switch jobs to another local maxima, but I think I broke the cycle, but mostly by refusing to keep playing the game.

I had weekly conversations with my friend who ended up hearing about all of my job complaints and this friend was able to see how my feelings about work changed over time. At times this friend was ready to hit me over the head because of how repetitive my complaints were.

Every time I interviewed and got a job offer, I would convince myself that I wanted to switch companies because company Y was offering me more money and responsibilities than company X and I thought company Y would give me growth opportunities beyond what I would have at company X. I would rationalize the decision in a lot of ways and would be thorough in comparing the pros and cons of switching to company Y.

And then I would talk to my friend. And my friend would say "okay, so company Y is offering you more money than company X. What do you want to do?" And I would say something like "I'm not 100% sure if I will be happy at company Y, but they're offering me more money and the company / team / product is cool. If I'm not happy in 1-2 years I can use that money to start my own company and be in a better position."

It didn't seem like I wanted to work at company Y that badly if my answer to "what do you want to do" isn't "work at company Y!" I justified my decision to change jobs by finding the things I didn't like at company X and contrasted them with the things I liked at company Y.

Leaving company X needs to be a separate decision from joining company Y in order to make the best decision. In the past I always considered them as the same decision. Even when I was interviewing at lots of companies which should have given me more choice, it always came down to making decisions about company Y based on company X instead of being about what I wanted to do for the long-term.

I talked to a bunch of other friends and family about switching to company Y and everyone else except this one friend went along with whatever I said. Some people lightly questioned what I said but only to see that I had an answer for their questions, but the human mind can rationalize basically anything and I had already fooled myself into thinking I wanted to switch jobs when I was just unhappy with company X.

I fooled everyone except my one friend, because my friend realized that my decision-making process was fundamentally flawed. That gave my friend the confidence to push-back on what I said. Having a contrary perspective gave me the space to reconsider my decisions.

I quit my job at company X and am currently trying to start my own company since that's what I wanted to do all along.

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