At one point, I literally thought that a street dog was freer than me. Work I didn't enjoy was consuming 50% of my waking life. Every day, I could feel the realisation hitting me harder than the alarm. And still, I stayed.
Why?
What's the obvious answer?
M.O.N.E.Y.
Some people think that their monthly salary is a reward to be encashed as soon as it hits the account. Resulting in no savings.
Worse, others are in debt, which is buying stuff from your future money.
This creates a deadly trap: no bandwidth to take breaks, no room to explore anything else. When survival depends on the next paycheck, the math does not care about your feelings.
But most conversations about career misery stop right here. They treat money as the complete explanation. It is not. The answer is bigger than money.
Why is Elon Musk still working?
He is worth hundreds of billions. Zero financial floor problem.
Or why do retired athletes become coaches? Why do surgeons who could retire at 50 keep operating at 70? Why do founders who sold for life-changing sums start a second company six months later?
The answer is obivously bigger than money.
In my upcoming book, Quit 9to5, I built a framework around this question. It is an adaptation of Maslow's hierarchy, but constructed specifically for why humans work. I call it the Why We Work Pyramid.
It has five levels. Each has a genuinely different driver.
Survival: working to cover basic needs. Any paying job is the right job at this stage. Pure exchange.
Safety: working for predictability. Consistent income, job security, a buffer against uncertainty. Most 9to5 contracts are designed to satisfy exactly this level.
Then the game changes.
Belonging and engagement: once you have enough money, what would you do? Party and travel for the rest of your life? You cannot do that for long. You need something to engage your attention. You want to be part of something, to collaborate, to feel stimulated beyond the paycheck. We humans, are hardwired to create solutions. If that creative energy has no outlet, it turns inward and leads to mental health challenges.
Excellence and esteem: beyond engagement comes mastery, recognition, and an identity that is more than a job title. We are social beings. We want to excel at whatever we do and derive a sense of status from it.
This is where you step out of the personal game.
Purpose and impact: here, the goal is to bring others to these higher levels. Personal pursuits no longer drive you. You want to give back, to build something beyond yourself.
The fundamental craving isn't to accumulate lots of value or money but to keep feeling valuable.
Elon Musk is not working for survival. Neither is the 70-year-old surgeon. Neither is the retired athlete who never quite left the sport. They are all somewhere near the top of this pyramid.
How does the trap actually close?
The trap is not money. The trap is making Level 2 decisions when you have already moved to Level 3 or 4.
Most people who describe hating their jobs are not struggling with survival or safety. They have enough. The dissatisfaction is coming from somewhere higher: no engagement, no growth, no sense that the work is building toward anything that matters to them.
And yet the logic they use to stay is Level 2 logic. "I cannot leave, I need the money." That was a valid argument at Level 1. At Level 4, it is a mismatch between the diagnosis and the cure.
When I accepted a COO role at a 30% salary cut, people thought I was being reckless. I was not operating on the salary dimension at all at that point. Learning and autonomy had moved up in weight.
The decision was completely rational from Level 4. It only looked irrational through a Level 2 lens.
What does your actual level require?
Once you identify which level is genuinely driving your dissatisfaction, the question changes.
Level 2 problem? The answer is about building a runway: save aggressively, reduce fixed costs, and build a financial bridge before anything else.
Level 3 or 4 problem? A pay raise will not fix it. A new manager probably will not either. The gap is about engagement, growth, and the kind of work you are doing.
After quitting my job, my pay dropped. By any Level 2 metric, that looks like a step backwards in one's career. At Level 4, it was the first year in a long time where the work actually felt meaningful.
The book goes much deeper into such discussions. Join the waitlist here.
So the real reason people stay at jobs they hate is…
A misdiagnosis.
Treating a Level 3 or Level 4 problem as a Level 2 problem. Solving for money when the real gap is somewhere above that. The pyramid does not tell you what to do. It tells you what you are actually working for.
Think about it. Which level is running your decisions right now?
Thought exercise: What would you do if you won a billion dollars today? Do not just think about next month. Think in years. What work would you still choose to do?