About a third of American workers say their job is just something to get them by.

That doesn’t mean a third of us should quit.

In 2024, the Pew Research Center asked American workers how they see their job. Half called it a career. Fifteen percent called it a stepping stone. And 35 percent—about a third—said it was “just a job to get them by.”

I spent a long time in that third.

What I got wrong was assuming it meant one thing.

It doesn’t.

I’ve come to think there are at least three different kinds of stuck wearing the same face, and they don’t have the same answer.

Telling them apart is most of the work.

1. The Wrong Room

The work itself is fine. You’re reasonably good at it, and on a decent day you don’t mind it at all.

What’s wrong is the room—the manager, the commute, the politics, the sense that nobody would notice if you did it well.

This is the one kind of stuck a new job actually fixes. It’s also the rarest reason people say they feel stuck, in my experience, and the one they reach for first, because it’s the only one with an obvious next step.

The tell: Imagine doing exactly this work somewhere else, with people you liked.

If that thought is a relief, you’re in the wrong room.

2. The Wrong Seat

Here the place is fine and the work is wrong—not wrong in the sense of bad, but wrong in the sense that it uses about a fifth of you.

You were hired for one thing and you’ve quietly become good at another. The parts of the week you’d happily do for free are the parts nobody assigned you.

A new job usually doesn’t fix this, because people tend to apply for the seat they already have.

They change buildings and take the same shape with them.

The tell: Look at what people interrupt you for.

Not what’s in your job description—what colleagues actually come to you for when they need something.

That’s often the seat you should be in.

3. No Direction Yet

This is the hard one, and I think it’s the most common.

You know you’d rather be doing something else.

You could not tell me what that something else is.

And because you can’t name it, every piece of advice you get slides right off—follow your passion, take the leap, find your why.

You’d love to.

You don’t have one on hand.

Changing jobs while you’re in this kind of stuck mostly relocates the feeling. Six months later it’s waiting for you in the new place, having made the move at your expense.

The tell: You can describe what you want to get away from in detail, and what you want to move toward not at all.

Why the Third One Gets Misdiagnosed

Because it’s the only one with no obvious action attached, and being stuck is uncomfortable enough that we’d rather do something than sit in it.

So people quit, or retrain, or buy the course, and call the motion progress.

The thing I’d offer, for whatever it’s worth: you don’t have to know what you want in order to start.

You just have to start somewhere other than a blank page.

Not “What’s my passion?”

That question has never once helped anybody who didn’t already know the answer.

Better questions are smaller and duller.

What do I keep reading about when nobody’s asking me to?

What do people come to me for?

What has twenty years of ordinary life actually handed me that I’ve stopped noticing because I’ve had it the whole time?

Answer enough of those and a Direction starts to show up on its own.

Not a five-year plan.

A Direction is enough to keep going on.

A Place to Start

That’s exactly why we created the Brighthaven Bay Alignment Workbook.

It’s a short, practical workbook designed to help you begin with the questions rather than rush toward an answer.

You’ll work through eight exercises that help you look at what pulls at you, what you already know and have, and where those pieces might be pointing.

You don’t need to know what your next career should be.

You don’t need a business idea.

And you certainly don’t need to quit your job tomorrow.

You just need a place to start looking.

The Story and the Questions

If some of these questions sound familiar, that’s intentional.

They’re the same kinds of questions Chase Carter and the other characters begin confronting throughout Brighthaven Bay.

The story explores them through their lives.

The Alignment Workbook gives you a place to explore them through yours.

Maybe you’ll discover you’re simply in the wrong room.

Maybe you’re sitting in the wrong seat.

Or maybe you don’t know your Direction yet.

That’s okay.

You don’t need the whole map to begin.

You just need enough Direction to take the next step.

Until next time,

Greg Hoyt

The Pew figure above is from the Pew Research Center’s December 2024 report on job satisfaction and security. Everything else here is one novelist’s opinion, not career, business, or financial advice.