Are most jobs not what you thought they would be? Expectations vs. reality.

Carrie
2025-03-03T17:00:38Z

I am trying to figure out and process my aversion to pursuing a career change.

What I have surmised is that I come to the conclusion, "well, in your past, most of the jobs you have studied or trained for, were not, in fact, what you thought they would be like in practice, so how do you know this is not the case with your new interest in career?"

What I'm looking for is people to challenge or confirm my assumptions: Example: "No, actually, your perception is distorted, most jobs are what people expect them to be."

I'm also looking for, validation or commiseration, "yeah, I feel that way too, it sucks" and am open to some problem solving, "I was once in your position and I did X,Y,Z and here were my results, YMMV"

Thank you for reading!

UPDATE

Thank you everyone, I understand now why people do those almost, "acceptance speeches" prominent on Reddit, it does feel like an outpouring of support/acknowledgement worthy of gratitude! So thank you all. If I haven't responded to you directly it's not personal, it could be non engagement response, or I just haven't gotten to it! But I appreciate your participation, regardless.

What I have realized is that maintaining my integrity is very high on my list of priorities, and what I consider integrity and its wholeness may not align with what is common. I realize that many people have to compromise their integrity day to day or year to year, and that almost no job will allow you to maintain full autonomy and integrity.

It seems that most people find a better balance of maintaining their values by being their own bosses, which makes sense, many neurodivergent people end up being self-employed. But, I also realize, even that will not allow me to escape a lot of my other feelings of discomfort, so I still want to continue to work on being more compatible with that.

I also realize my risk aversion to trying out working for myself is a huge obstacle in pursuing it, and am thinking about how to reduce the steps towards that to make it easier for me to try out. I will still say the other component of avoiding that is the USA healthcare system, I'm not sure if anyone has really addressed that (for those of you not familiar, the USA basically does not want anyone on subsidized healthcare to make over a certain amount of money, otherwise they take the healthcare away, and the privatized options are not worth the monetary trade off for many - I won't get into the details of that in this post). So that is a real obstacle I would have to overcome, that I still have no answer for.

Again, thank you everyone, for your time and effort.

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