Forty or more hours a week, 9 am to 5 pm or later, short breaks then back at it again.  Sound familiar? Many jobs have this format but a growing number (particularly after the pandemic) are adopting a different format and requiring workers to figure out solutions to new challenges.  Whether you are a restaurant server, warehouse supervisor, or a CEO, the idea that a job or a career is a regular and necessary part of life is built into our culture. Just think of the perceptions around the idea of being “unemployed” or “jobless” or how many times you may have heard growing up things like “you need a job” or “no one likes to work, but you have to do it.”  From the time you begin to work until retirement, it is assumed that everyone needs to work a job in order to achieve.  It is here where many people struggle with the idea of sacrificing so much of their time to a job when their values would suggest a different use of their time and energy.  There are also many people who place themselves in their job or career doing what they love and where their values agree with how they use their time.  Now here is the $50,000-a-year question (before taxes); How in the heck do you figure out what is right for you?

According to the Harvard Business Review (Ian Cook, 2021), from 2020 to 2021, people ages 30-45 showed a 20% increase in resignations during a year that also held the highest number of job openings in the history of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.  For these folks, being away from their jobs was more valuable to them when compared to the pros and cons of staying at their jobs. These decisions are not easy and can have large effects on individuals, couples, and families… and yet, it is still happening.  

If you found yourself in a job with a solid paycheck, benefits, and a cooperative team atmosphere, you may consider yourself well established or accomplished and that may be true.  It is easy to accept the amount of time dedicated to a job you are not passionate about if the pros outweighed the cons for you.  Now picture yourself with an opportunity to pursue other uses of your time and energy that align with your values and interests. This pandemic has pushed an increasing number of people to re-evaluate these pros and cons and more are concluding that the pros for resigning (and cons of staying at their job) is more valuable than the pros of staying at their job (and the cons of resigning).  How we spend our precious time and energy is worth checking-in on every so often. Some people work their entire lives with a genuine smile and others strive to live a life of leisure.  Neither is “wrong”.  This simply raises the questions of what is it that YOU want YOU to do with your time. Below is an example of a pros and cons you can use to help begin the conversation, but remember, happiness can look like a 9-5 job, owning your own business, traveling the world, or virtually anything else. How you feel about what you do is more important than what you do. 

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