I wrote about this yesterday and want to take it further, because I was stuck for a long time myself.
From 2018 to 2022, four years, I was in this position. On one side I knew I was bored of the job. I understood the rules of the game and I could play them, but I couldn’t fully agree with any of it, and I’d started to find that version of myself distasteful. On the other side, I knew exactly what kind of work and what kind of life I actually wanted. I knew I wanted to go solo and be my own boss. And I was also attached to the stability, attached to a six-figure salary, and afraid of carrying all the risk alone. More than that, I was afraid of going out on my own, failing, and discovering that I was someone who needed a company’s platform after all. So I stayed indecisive, and unable to really move.
Stuck looks different for everyone. Yours might be a different shape.
Maybe you’re not thinking of leaving to go solo, but you do want a different job. The current one is meaningless and you aren’t growing, and you haven’t worked up the nerve to go through the whole exhausting search again. You’re also not sure what the next job ought to be different about.
Or your work has earned enormous verbal recognition from your manager, and none of it has converted into anything you can hold. No promotion, no rise. You want to push for it, and you don’t know when the right moment is or how to open the conversation.
Or you want to start something on the side. You can already feel that the nine-to-five is going to change beyond recognition in the AI era. But you’re worried about how much a side business demands, worried about picking the wrong lane, worried about failing, or simply short of time and energy. So you haven’t moved.
One optimistic way to look at this: being stuck can be what comes immediately before the next possibility becomes real. A bit like a pregnancy. Handled well, it’s gestation, and what gets born is the next chapter of your work and your life.
Here’s a method that can slowly unstick you. Create a variable on purpose.
Meaning: if you’ve always done something one way, call it A, then deliberately don’t do A. Do B instead, and watch what happens. What being stuck cannot survive is change.
Concretely. If you never ask your manager for a rise directly, try asking. If you never set up coffee chats to see what’s out there, set one up. If you’ve never put anything on social media, put something out, one opinion or one piece of your own experience. The variable doesn’t have to be big. The operative word is different.
What you have to get past here is fear of the unknown. The familiar route may be uncomfortable, but it feels safe. I understand that, I dislike change myself. Still, I’d say this: that feeling of familiar safety isn’t real. The only thing that genuinely doesn’t change is change.