Three Years In, I Stared at My Old Coworker's New Address for a Long Time

Three years ago, when I took this job, I picked it for one reason: it was easy. The workload was light, I'd be out the door by eight most nights, and the office politics were close to nonexistent — nobody was racing anybody. The starting pay wasn't great. I said yes on the spot anyway. Anything beat staying up late writing status reports.

Last Wednesday night, a guy who started around the same time as me — and later jumped to a much more cutthroat job — posted a location pin from his new apartment. I stared at the name of that neighborhood for a long time, my thumb hovering over the like button. In the end I didn't tap it.

That's the moment I finally noticed something: what was bothering me wasn't the job itself. Three years in, it hadn't really changed. Same workload, same time I clock out, same modest raises — roughly 20% total over three years, which is basically just keeping pace with inflation.

What had actually changed was the yardstick I was quietly swapping out underneath myself. The year I started, I measured myself against classmates who were still sending out resumes with no callbacks — by that standard, I felt lucky. Three years later, I was measuring myself against the coworker who'd chosen the grind and just bought a place. By that standard, I suddenly felt like I'd lost.

Same job, two different rulers, two completely different feelings. The job never moved an inch.

Swapping out your reference point isn't something that happens with an announcement. Nobody calls a meeting to tell you "starting today, measure yourself against someone else." It happens because the people around you keep moving forward, and your own coordinates get dragged along without you noticing. By the time you catch yourself, you've usually already gone through a few rulers.

Conflating these two things is expensive. The most common pattern I've seen: the moment "I feel unhappy" gets rebranded as "this job is the problem," the next move is almost always quitting or jumping ship — betting that a change of scenery will cure the discomfort.

But the reference point comes with you. At the new company, I'd find a new group of people who are "doing better than me" soon enough, and the same discomfort would show up again on schedule, just wearing a different face and pointing at a different neighborhood.

Not being able to tell whether the job actually got worse or your own ruler just shifted is exactly how people talk themselves into an irreversible decision for the wrong reason.

What actually needs separating first is whether the job itself got worse, versus whether my internal ruler moved. The first one is visible: did the workload go up, did overtime increase, did the raises fall noticeably behind. The second one isn't visible at all — but it's the thing that decides whether these three years were wasted, or whether it's just my mood that shifted.

My method these days is unglamorous: I dig up the list of expectations I wrote down in my notes the day I got the offer, and go through it item by item against how the job looks now. If most of them still hold, the job's probably fine — it's my mood that changed. If most of them don't, that's when it's worth seriously considering a move.

I still didn't like that location pin. I'm genuinely happy for him. But in those few seconds staring at the screenshot, I honestly couldn't tell whether I envied the apartment, or the nerve it took him to grind for it.

Next time the thought "this job keeps getting worse" shows up in my head, I'm going to ask myself one question first: did it actually change, or did the ruler I hold up against it just quietly slide forward another notch.