Two kinds of staying
Staying can be a decision you have made, or one you keep deferring. From the outside they look identical.
“I’ve stopped looking. I’ll think about it again next year.”
Someone said that to me last month.
It was the second sentence that made me want to explore the ideas and feelings behind it. The first one I understood completely. It was the way next year had been set down. A fixed point, arriving on its own, asking nothing in the meantime.
The reasoning behind the decision is sound. UK vacancies are around their lowest level outside the pandemic since 2014, and while there are early signs of a thaw, this is not a market that rewards optimism. Permanent placements stabilised in July after 45 months of decline, and temporary vacancies rose for the first time in two years, but the picture remains difficult. Staying put isn’t cowardice. It’s arithmetic. “Job hugging” gets written about as though it were a character flaw, when most of the time it’s simply a rational response to uncertainty.
But the market isn’t really what I want to write about. What interests me is what a long period of uncertainty does to a person’s thinking, because that is the part that doesn’t move when conditions do.
What uncertainty does to thinking
Uncertainty doesn’t just change our behaviour. It changes the boundaries of what we allow ourselves to consider.
We stop exploring. We stop asking questions. We tell ourselves that now is not the time. Over months, that becomes a habit rather than a decision, and the habit is quiet enough that we rarely notice it forming.
I notice it most in the language people use. Options get described in terms of what has already been ruled out. Whole categories of work disappear from the conversation without ever being examined. Too late, too risky, not realistic at the moment. And there is almost always a phrase like when things settle, doing an enormous amount of work while pointing at nothing in particular.
What strikes me is how often this happens to people who are perfectly capable of thinking clearly about everything else. It isn’t a failure of intelligence. It’s what caution does when it goes on long enough to stop feeling like caution and start feeling like realism.
And it doesn’t correct itself. Markets recover on their own. A narrowed sense of what’s possible tends not to.
Two kinds of staying
This is why I think it’s useful to separate two things that look exactly the same from the outside.
Staying because you’ve looked at your life, your career and the market and decided that staying is right for you is one thing. That’s a considered position. It has reasons behind it, and those reasons can be revisited when something changes.
Staying because contemplating anything else currently feels too risky is another. From the outside it looks identical. From the inside it feels like patience, which is what makes it so hard to spot in yourself. But nothing has actually been weighed, so there is nothing to revisit. Only a decision that keeps being deferred.
Neither means you should leave. I want to be clear about that, because the version of this conversation that circulates online usually ends with an instruction to be braver, and that isn’t coaching. Plenty of people have looked hard at their circumstances and concluded that staying is right, and they are correct. The difference isn’t what you choose. It’s whether you chose.
What preparation actually looks like
Career transitions rarely start with a resignation. They often start much earlier and much more quietly, with allowing yourself to think seriously about what you want, what you would explore if exploration didn’t equal commitment, and what would help you feel more prepared.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. A great deal of thinking gets avoided because it feels like the first step towards a decision nobody is ready to make. But considering something is not the same as choosing it, and you are allowed to look at a possibility without owing it anything.
In practice, the useful work is often unglamorous. Being able to describe what you do and what you’re good at, in language that isn’t borrowed from your current employer. Knowing which parts of your work you would want to keep and which you would be relieved to put down. Having a small number of honest conversations with people who see things from a different angle than you do. Understanding your own financial floor clearly enough that risk becomes a number rather than a feeling.
None of that commits you to anything. All of it takes time you won’t have if you wait until you need it.
Questions worth sitting with
If any of this is familiar, these are the questions I would start with. They are not quick ones, and they tend to be more useful written down than answered in your head.
- If you knew you weren’t going to move for another two years, what would you want those two years to build?
- What have you stopped considering, and did you decide against it, or did it just quietly drop off the list?
- When you say not yet, what specifically would need to be true for the answer to become now?
- What would you want if the choice were made for you next month?
The last one is uncomfortable, which is rather the point. Change tends to come from both directions. Some of the people I speak with chose their transition. Others had it chosen for them, and found themselves doing all of this thinking under time pressure, which is the hardest possible way to do it.
The question underneath
So the question isn’t whether to leave. It’s whether you’ve given yourself permission to think about what you’d want if change came, by choice or otherwise.
What would feeling more prepared look like for you?