I’ve heard that sentence more times than I can count.

A VP with 14 years at the same company. A director who hadn’t felt genuinely excited about her work in three years. A guy who had built a career in finance but wanted to make furniture since he was 22.

They all knew. They all stayed.

That gap between knowing and doing is where many professional lives quietly fall apart.

The Trap Nobody Talks About

Psychologists Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer proved this back in 1985. The more time, money, or effort you’ve already put into something, the stronger your pull to keep going with it, even when logic says stop.

Think of it like buying a ticket to a concert you’re dreading. You show up not because you want to, but because you already paid. Except with your career, the ticket costs you a decade of your life.

Your brain hates waste. So it writes a story that makes staying sound reasonable.

“I’m almost vested.”

“Things will get better after the restructure.”

“I’ve built too much here to walk away.”

That’s not wisdom. That’s loss aversion.

What the Research Actually Shows

A 2024 peer-reviewed study in Frontiers in Psychology confirmed what I watched play out repeatedly during my years in the C-suite. When the fit between who you are and what your job actually requires breaks down, work pressure climbs, and burnout follows. Not occasionally. Consistently.

Bakker and de Vries (2021) showed the same thing from a different angle. When your personal abilities, needs, and preferences fall out of sync with your daily work, the result is what researchers call job strain. And that strain is chronic, not episodic.

Next, your nervous system starts treating your workplace like a quiet, persistent threat. Then cortisol takes over. After that, your creativity, judgment, and energy start eroding.

Finally, you drag yourself through the week, wondering why you feel like a completely different person than you were five years ago.

You didn’t change. The fit did.

Why Identity Keeps You Anchored

Here’s the thing. For most senior professionals, the job stopped being just a job a long time ago. It became who you are.

Twenty years in one industry wires your identity into that field. Leaving doesn’t feel like changing jobs. It feels like losing yourself.

Social pressure stacks on top of that. The title. The salary. The way people describe you at dinner parties. The LinkedIn profile that reads like a highlight reel, nobody questions.

Veronika Tait, a sunk cost researcher at Snow College, said it plainly: changing course feels like admitting you made a mistake. So people dig in deeper instead of taking honest stock.

I watched this play out with a senior leader I had worked alongside for nearly two years. Genuinely brilliant. Completely wrong environment. He knew it by year three. He stayed until year nine. The last two years did real damage to his health, his relationships, and quietly, his sense of who he actually was.

Let’s Get Honest About the Cost

The question most people keep asking themselves is: “What have I built here?” That’s the wrong question.

The right one is: what is staying here costing me right now?

Not what you already invested. What you are actively losing every single day you remain.

Sleep. Energy. Creative output. Physical health. Genuine enthusiasm for anything.

If that list doesn’t add up, that’s not a sign to keep going. That’s a signal worth taking seriously.

Your past investment is gone, no matter what you decide next. The only real choice is what happens from this point forward.

The Burnout Connection

Staying in the wrong environment is not a career dissatisfaction issue. It is the actual mechanism of burnout.

Burnout is a defect in the relationship between a person and their environment. You cannot sleep it off, and you cannot vacation your way out of it if you keep returning to the same misfit.

The environment is the problem. The environment has to change. Or better put: YOUR relationship with the environment has to change.

Your First Move

You don’t have to quit tomorrow.

But you do need to stop talking yourself out of what you already know.

Start by asking yourself when you last felt genuinely right where you were. Not just fine. Actually right. That memory holds more information than you’re probably giving it credit for.

If you’re ready to get serious about what comes next, I work with people who are done tolerating environments that produce more stress than results. Let’s talk at https://book.drdegnan.com.

Cheers! Until next week, my friend!

—Oliver

PS: This is my 100th edition of this newsletter with 97.4k subscribers! đź‘Š

Wanna Geek Out? 👇

Arkes, H. R., & Blumer, C. (1985). The psychology of sunk cost. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 35(1), 124–140. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(85)90049-4

Bakker, A. B., & de Vries, J. D. (2021). Job demands–resources theory and self-regulation: New explanations and remedies for job burnout. Anxiety, Stress, & Coping, 34(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/10615806.2020.1797695

EdĂş-Valsania, S., LaguĂ­a, A., & Moriano, J. A. (2022). Burnout: A review of theory and measurement. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(3), 1780. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19031780

Zeng, X., & Hu, X. (2024). A study of the psychological mechanisms of job burnout: Implications of person–job fit and person–organization fit. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1351032. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1351032