Sunken Cost Fallacy: Your Job Title Doesn’t Define You

Many of us are on a lifelong mission to pursue our dreams, but our past career choices often act like an anchor. It weighs us down and prevents us from being who we wish we were. Your job title doesn’t define you – you are much more than that.

While a job or profession might be an easy label to apply, in many ways, it is not healthy to define who we are exclusively by what we do at work. Each of our lives has the potential for so much more meaning. Yet too many of us live and breathe our work and bind it to our identity. As the years go on, that can form some powerful psychological ties.

To some extent, it is because self-esteem is easy to come by in a results-oriented work environment. Even if work brings no intrinsic pleasure, the remuneration allows us to enjoy other things. We are a chemical engineer, but at a deeper level, we are an environmental activist and passionate gardener. In this case it is clear that your job title doesn’t define you. We wish we had a job more connected with our passions, but we often don’t have the courage to make a change.

So, for years, we tell ourselves that we are a chemical engineer, first and foremost. We might do a little more gardening one year and take part in more environmental rallies the following year. Our work identity is constant, and if we are not careful, it can burrow deep into our consciousness. Being a chemical engineer is central to everything that we do.

What if your job title defines you?

When the time comes for a career change (and it will come), we feel so bound by being a chemical engineer that we cannot imagine being anything else. But maybe the industry is going through hard times, so we are forced to change. 

The sunken cost fallacy of basing our identity around our work will ensure that any career transition makes us feel lost and worthless. If we didn’t attach enough importance to our environmental activity and gardening in previous years, we wouldn’t be able to hang on to those parts of our identity after our chemical engineering career disappears. 

Making a fresh start with no sense of who we really are is not a recipe for success.

Your identity is not what you do at work. It is the combination of your friends, passions, values, and what you choose to do whenever you are NOT at work. The definition of who you are is what you do when you have a spare Sunday morning or what you talk about when you are eating a meal with friends. If you choose to work (or talk about work), that feeling of sunken cost in your self-identity will simply be reinforced.

Break out of the idea that your work is your life. 

Do whatever brings you happiness as often as you possibly can. That is who you are, and that is what you will be able to hold onto when the time comes for a career change.

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This blog is shared with Job Seeker Duetists. 

Written by former recruitment ghostwriter Paul Drury (not AI).