What is Job Lock—and how do you get out?

What to do when the handcuffs aren’t golden anymore

I have a problem. I hate running. 

Like, I actually despise it. It’s boring, it’s tedious—and I’m pretty sure that the runner’s high everyone talks about is just a mass delusion. (yeah, I’ve tried running slower, longer, faster, shorter….those endorphins just never show up). Also, I’ve got a bum knee, torn up after a fall from an obstacle in 2021. It likes running even less than I do.

The problem is, no matter how much I and my knee hate running, I hate other forms of cardio even more. I’m a boulderer and a former ninja warrior—I like my exercise like I like my Netflix binges: short, intense, with lots and lots of rest in between. 

So, if I want any sustained cardio in my life, running it is. Which is why I went for a run this morning. 

Hated every second of it. 

I’m currently in Toamasina, Madagascar’s second-biggest city, located on its eastern coast. The air here is, well…it’s a liquid. It coats your lungs with its tropical stickiness.

Every step was a slog this morning. Every time I looked at my watch, certain I’d covered at least a quarter of a mile, I came up disappointed. It’s amazing how long 500 feet feels when you’re moving through minestrone.

But, I kept running. Through the soup. Because it’s “good for me.” 

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A few years ago, I started one of the worst jobs I’d ever had. I didn’t know it at the time, obviously—I was thrilled that I’d finally gotten a job I’d been dreaming about for the last decade.

Three years in, the job felt like running through minestrone on a bad knee. Mondays were quicksand. Yet I persisted—because I felt like it was good for me. I was, after all, in my dream job. I had the nicer office, the steady paycheck, and colleagues who envied what I was doing.

Secretly, I envied them instead.

People would tell me how excited they were for me and my success. I’d post about the cool things we were doing on Instagram—just like one of those relationships that’s also always posting on Instagram. The more amazing the photos, the more effusive the declarations of love—the more miserable the couple often is IRL. 

I was trapped, not by failure, but by success. There’s a name for this. 

The Golden Handcuffs aren’t about gold

Golden handcuffs aren’t just about money. Yes, high salaries and generous benefits are part of what keep people in jobs they hate. That, health insurance, and the activation energy of finding a new job, maybe in a new city. 

For many of us, the real handcuffs come from something deeper: our jobs give us identity.

I didn’t stay in that terrible job because I couldn’t find another one. I was stuck because I’d invested years in medical school, grad school, and leadership training; endless nights and countless weekends doing the extra work, building an identity that I deeply believed I wanted. 

And even though I’d quickly found out that this wasn’t what I actually wanted, to admit that, to change—that would be an existential failure. 

Job lock

I didn’t know it at the time, but there were a few interesting things happening in my psyche in that job, things that kept me stuck longer than was healthy.

The first is something called identity-based commitment escalation, something we’ve been unknowingly saddled with since childhood. The idea here, elaborated in Brockner and Rubin’s 1985 book about conflict, is that as children, we derive identity from our parents. And we subconsciously notice which of our behaviors pleases those parents. We then internalize those behaviors as our own self identity. 

Behaviors that worked when we were six don’t work when we’re sixteen or sixty. But, because they’ve become part of an “us” that the important people nurtured, then even “when an identity prescribes a behavior that has outlived its usefulness…the tremendous amount of investment” we and others have made into that identity means we stick with the obsolete behavior anyway. 

In other words, our identities can lock us into things that have far outlived their usefulness.

Public commitments can do the same. And what is more public than our jobs. I mean, it’s almost a requirement to make a LinkedIn post any time you land a new job, right? “I’m excited to announce that I’ll be joining…”

What a vicious cycle we set up for ourselves. Jobs that reinforce our identity, which then reinforces our need to stay in that job, bolstered by LinkedIn posts we’ve made, concerns about what our CVs would look like if we jump “too early”, worries about how a jump would affect our identity… It’s no wonder we stick with things well past their usefulness. 

The longer you stay, the longer you stay

Early in residency, doctors learn an important rule about working in a hospital: The longer you stay, the longer you stay.

In other words, the longer you stay at the hospital, the more work will be assigned to you, which, in turn, leads you to staying even longer. 

And that’s true in jobs, too. In 2011, Matthew Bidwell found that “workers promoted into jobs have…lower rates of voluntary and involuntary exit.”  

The longer you stay, the more likely you are to be promoted, and, once promoted, the longer you stay.

Not only are we locked in by identity and public commitments, but the longer we allow ourselves to be locked in, the thicker the golden shackles become. 

It’s the paradox of comfort: the very things that attract us end up trapping us tighter. 

Our brains fool us into thinking the discomfort of staying is safer than the uncertainty of leaving.

How to pick the lock

The thing about running—the only good thing about running, according to my knee—is that it ends. 

As can job lock. 

Here are three tips from the decision science world for picking that lock, no matter how long you’ve been stuck.

1. First, change how you frame your job decision
We have a tendency to focus on the things we might regret when making a big switch. And then we avoid making the switch because regret sucks. But instead of focusing on what you might lose by leaving (salary, status), ask yourself what you’re already losing by staying (joy, time, health). Flip your mental script from loss to gain.

2. Define a new metric of success
Along that same line: redefine what it is you want to accomplish in the next step in your career. A fascinating 2014 paper by Sheldon and Krieger found that lawyers who prioritize intrinsic values in their jobs (things like purpose, relationships, autonomy, personal growth) over extrinsic ones (money, prestige, and the like) report greater happiness and fewer regrets. 

3. Undertake a low-risk experiment
The thing about job lock is that it’s easy. We stay in jobs because we know them. Because, no matter how much we hate them, we can at least meet their demands. Taking a big leap, on the other hand—we don’t even know if we can do that. So…try something small. Start dabbling in what you think you want to do next on the side; talk to someone who’s successfully pivoted; if your industry allows it, try a sabbatical. Low-risk experiments reduce uncertainty and can help clarify your next step.

The fact is, job lock makes us sacrifice our future selves on the altar of today’s comfort, today’s identity, today’s prestige. 

You deserve a job that serves you—not the other way around. 

And if that’s not the case, it’s time to start picking that lock. 

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