Why a career transition feels so damn existential. It’s not just a change in job title. It’s several changes arriving at different depths.

I once met a woman who’d made several career changes in a short space of time. We’d met a few months from the end of her contract as an English teacher. She’d taken the temporary gig to buy herself some time, while searching for a career she could finally commit to. She told me her story.

When she left school, she’d wanted to study fashion design, but it didn’t feel like a serious career path, so she compromised and enrolled in fashion business instead. A few years as a marketer showed her the superficial side of the industry, which began to take it’s toll on her. Eventually, she burned out.

At the end of her break, she decided to enrol in a master’s program. After graduating, she was hired as a data analyst at a tech company, and a year later, she burned out again.

Her recovery journey led her to work in mental health. She found the work meaningful but it didn’t afford her the same lifestyle her tech job had, and she was tentative about retraining again. So here she was, unsure about what to do next and frustrated that she’d “wasted so much time.”

I wondered whether this was a matter of reframing her career as a non-linear one. Although, from her emotional state and the consecutive burn outs, I didn’t get the sense that these changes had been expansive for her. It sounded like an initial rush of inspiration accompanied each change, then disappointment followed shortly after. I suspected that something closer to anxiety was motivating the changes. I also had questions about that first compromise, choosing “serious” work, instead of the work she actually wanted to do. I wondered how often that showed up in other parts of her life.

I’ve come to nickname this pattern a set change. The scenery changes: a new industry, a new qualification, a new job. It comes with a burst of excitement because the new environment promises to fix whatever felt wrong in the last one, but the person remains the same. As Jon Kabat-Zinn puts it, wherever you go, there you are.

It’s the same pattern you might see in the friend who drifts from relationship to relationship in search of The One, or the friend who moves from country to country in search of something they’re not even sure of. Perhaps you’ve been that friend? I know I have.

If, like me, you’ve attempted a few set changes and the same feelings have followed you, it’s worth considering that what needs to change isn’t the set.

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