For the last month, I have been feeling like quitting my 9-to-5 job that I was so happy with. Their recent shift from hybrid to full on-site has made me feel so. I am frustrated, tired, and mentally unstable due to the continuous stress and hectic transportation medium. Can't take it anymore, feeling like quitting everything instantly.
You tell me, if you are getting frustrated with your core hustle, how will you continue if you really can't enjoy it? How are you gonna dedicate yourself completely to bringing out the best performance? No way possible, it will be like continuing with an attempt to fit in where I'm not getting fitted properly.
Why so? Aren’t most of the people doing the same?
Yes, from a general perspective, most people doing a job go through almost the same thing. Are they happy with their job? Most of them aren’t; they've compromised with reality. They have taken this as it is and are compromising with this.
Lemme picture you the scenario here, in Dhaka. If I average the distance for all, it will be roughly around 3km, which takes almost an hour, for some it's two, and for very few it would be less than an hour. On top of that, the hectic experience of local bus journeys. I don't know whether the people in Dhaka increased, the number of local buses decreased, or the people who can afford other transportation decreased and are getting dependent on local transportation to save some bucks here. Whether you admit it or not, the last one seems the most logical to me. To keep pace with the increasing prices of everything, people are finding it hard to keep pace with them, so they are cutting back on these places.
Okay, I'm doing this. One of my colleagues shared his past and present costs, based on his previous lifestyle and priorities. The monthly transportation expense for him was somewhere around 30 USD, which is now below 3.5 USD. The amount could be very little compared to the expenses around you, but for a south asian country like ours, this one is not negligible. Not only this, but there are a few more things to do to cut costs.
That's how life goes here, little by little, to accumulate for the bigger ones. A responsible man looks for ways to save a penny for his family, but he can spend a mountain on his family for their well-being, for their comfort. That's how mysterious these characters are. Like in the past, I have seen my dad, like he has a shirt that doesn't get torn and uses for years, and we? changing one by one on every occasion. Now, I'm feeling like that, what's on clothes? They are well enough, but I feel like an unnecessary expense to me now. But for family, these don't matter.
Where was I? To quit the job.
So, from where I came from, my physical fitness is not suitable for a five-day onsite job, that too in a city like Dhaka, where countless hours get wasted in traffic jams, and life goes on like that for an eternity. wasn't on the contract either when we joined in, we got an offer for a hybrid, now after 8 months, they are on full remote, and the salary didn't increase as well, with the excuse of the company going through a hard time.
Every day, when I come back home, I am so tired and exhausted that my body can't recover without sleep, let alone my mental health. Sleep? That's another illusion for me, can't sleep properly, not by quality or quantity. All these would have been compensated via money, but here the salary isn't satisfactory as well. All I'm staying is because I have no other option; once I get it, I won't hesitate to pull the trigger.
Anything else to conciliate the mind?
Yeah, the learning opportunity and facilities I'm using. I have an immense thirst for exploring the stuff that I don't know yet and keep solving those problems. I feel like this is the moment to go on full throttle, so the next place I step in shouldn't throw me into the same hurdles. Trying to be the better version of myself to be invincible towards the hardships.
So I'm learning different solutions and services that align with my preferred role. Getting a chance to use premium subscriptions that would have been impossible for me to afford. Like the AWS account where I'm the admin, due to work purposes, I need to work with different instances, and I run and practice my projects on them as well. Let's not mention the subscriptions like ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, and so on. They are boosting the learning speed a lot, never stuck, they give reasonable solutions to work on and validate.
Another thing, I have told myself to fool myself, “Look, these ‘startups’ are always a great place to learn and grow, things happen very fast, the learning curve is always shooting high along with the increased stress.” This is how I'm motivating myself to stay on the track even with the less I'm getting paid or extreme stress. The trade-offs are for larger gains in future endeavours.
To be honest, this is what most of the freshers do on their first jobs / early days. They take it for the learning growth, and to pass the experience barrier regardless of salary, so that on the next destination they can better negotiate on their interest if the existing one doesn’t value them properly. I'm on that as well, soon going to hit the 1-year of experience milestone, and then I'm on my own to look for another destination if they don’t evaluate me properly with the salary I deserve according to my workload.
So yeah, even though I don't want to continue under such stress and an unjustifiable salary, I'm left with no option, can't pull the trigger right now. With the above-described illusion, I'm bringing some hope and peace to mind to continue for the time being.