I worked at a company selling projectors, screens, smart boards. They had a consumer electronics webshop, which back in the early 2000s was still a fresh idea. I was making decent money, not great, not terrible.

For the first three years I tried. I brought ideas, pushed initiatives, looked for ways to make things better. Every single one was denied. Not argued against, not discussed, just quietly shut down until I stopped bringing them.

So I stopped.

The last two years I did the minimum possible not to get fired. I showed up, did what was asked, went home. No initiative, no energy, no care. I wasn't angry about it. I'd just quietly disconnected.

The strange part is how normal it felt. Nobody pulled me aside. Nobody noticed the difference, or if they did, they didn't say anything. The paychecks came. The days passed. Nothing broke.

Eventually they let me go. And in the exit interview I said it to their face: two years too late. I meant it as a fact, not an insult. They should have fired me two years earlier. I should have left two years earlier. Both of us kept the arrangement going because ending it would have required someone to say out loud what everyone already knew.

That exit interview was the most honest conversation I had in five years at that company. It lasted ten minutes.

Here's the mechanism I didn't understand while I was living inside it. There's a specific kind of situation that traps people, and it's not the painful kind. Pain forces a decision. You get fired, you get screamed at, something breaks, and you act. The dangerous version is tolerable. Bad enough to drain you, not bad enough to end. Nothing is terrible. Nothing is good. The paychecks keep coming. And because nothing is actively wrong, there's no trigger to leave.

Your brain needs a reason to act. In the absence of crisis, it defaults to staying. And staying doesn't feel like a choice. It feels like the absence of a choice, which is exactly why it's so effective at keeping you stuck. You're not deciding to stay. You're just not deciding to leave. The difference sounds small. It's the difference between five years and three.

That's how most people lose years. Not to bad jobs but to tolerable ones. Jobs that aren't painful enough to quit but aren't alive enough to stay in honestly. You tell yourself you're being practical. The market is tough, the timing isn't right, you'll figure it out next quarter. Next quarter becomes next year. Next year becomes normal.

The cost isn't the salary you could have earned somewhere else. It's what happens to you when you spend years not caring about what you do for eight hours a day. Something inside you that used to reach for things stops reaching. The part that says "this could be better" goes quiet because it learned that reaching changes nothing. You get slower, not physically. Something dims. And because it dims gradually, you don't notice until you're standing in an unemployment office feeling something for the first time in two years. Not excitement. Just the absence of a weight you'd been pretending wasn't there.

The move I use now to avoid this trap is a question I ask myself every six months: "If they let me go tomorrow, would I fight to stay?" Not financially. Emotionally. Would I feel loss, or would I feel relief? When the answer is relief, that's the signal. Not to quit that day. But to stop pretending the arrangement is temporary and start treating it as what it is.

I ignored that signal for two years because acting on it meant admitting something uncomfortable. Relief at losing your job means you already lost something more important while you were there.