Leaving a job you’re supposed to be grateful for.

You mention wanting to leave your job. Someone immediately reminds you how lucky you are. The salary. The flexibility. The title. The fact that other people would love that opportunity. You know. You’ve made the same list yourself. Usually on Sunday evening, while trying to talk yourself into another week. A good job can be remarkably difficult to leave because you feel obliged to produce a sufficiently serious complaint. A terrible manager would help. So would an obvious injustice. Something you could explain over dinner without sounding ungrateful. Instead, you have a collection of smaller things. You’re interested in very little of the work. You’ve stopped wanting the next promotion. When someone describes where the department is heading, you calculate how old you’ll be when it gets there. None of this automatically means you should resign. You may need a different role, a proper break, a conversation you’ve been avoiding, or a clearer picture of what you’d actually move towards. But you need room to investigate those possibilities without cross-examining yourself for having them. Try setting the gratitude list aside for a moment. If nobody else had an opinion about this job, what would you want to understand about your next move? You can appreciate what a role has given you and still ask whether you want another five years of it.