I Decided to Quit My Decent Paying Job Because I Was Bored to Death

After all, “work-life balance” goes both ways.

I haven’t had the time to write and publish more articles since February this year because I had been busy moving out of my hometown to seek more career opportunities in Jakarta.

Fast forward 4 months later, I’ve decided to quit this one job that I once believed had so much potential and prospects to grow.

Most of the career issues that people often face are being underpaid, too much workload, toxic demanding bosses, or extended office hours. Mine on the other hand was quite the opposite but it’s still not a good thing.

Being bored to death at work and being overworked are two sides of the same coin

When we say work-life balance, it must mean we do work that is as meaningful as our lives get to be. Being bored to death and not having much to do while still being paid above the market price might seem like a good deal AT FIRST.

Fresh graduates or gullible people who have been off the job market for a while like me tend to fall for this “as long as you got paid” trap. It’s slowly killing and burning you from the inside as much as a toxic work environment and controlling bosses could do. It numbs the mind and the soul and certainly hinders you from upgrading your skills to advance your career.

When I told my bosses that I wanted to resign due to the reasons above, one of the things they said to me was:

“I always knew you’re not someone who prioritizes money. You don’t look like you need money, do you?”

Translation: “you should be grateful that you have a job that pays and doesn’t overwork you.”

It’s not without any reason why there wasn’t much work to do

My bosses are a married couple with two kids. I was aware that they’ve got other sources of income and they need to spend time with their kids as well. I fully understand that. But that doesn’t matter because once you’ve decided to hire full-time employees, you should also include ALL of them in your list of neverending responsibilities. You can’t expect your employees to walk on their own, or worse, think that they care about your business as much as you.

Red flag #1: No sense of leadership

Business owners =/= leaders. On top of that, nobody should freely refer to themselves as ‘CEOs’ just because they own a business.

I would propose an idea to my bosses and every answer would always be accompanied by “it’s up to you, Monika. You’re the expert here. We’ll just follow your direction.”

No clear direction, wants, needs, ideas, objections, or disagreement ever came out of their mouths.

I couldn’t just do whatever I liked because what if things went south? All sorts of blames would have come to burden me the most.

That’s not the only bad thing here.

The lack of communication was so agonizing and when I confronted them about it, they said that I was too blunt and straightforward so they felt a little bit scared of how I’d respond to them.

A boss who is afraid of their own employees and criticism needs to be avoided at all costs because it says a lot about how they run their business.

Red flag #2: No sense of discipline

My bosses allowed me to have flexible working hours as long as I got to finish work on time. I thought it was a great idea at first until something very terrible happened to the brand’s Instagram account which had roughly 60k followers.

We got hacked during a long holiday period here in Indonesia last month. Since then, I started feeling their motivation and spirit to run this business plummeted 36,201 feet deep down the Mariana Trench.

My bosses once didn’t show up at their office at all for 2–3 days straight and left us with nothing to work on. No WhatsApp chats/calls, no arranged meetings. No meaningful replies as well when I tried to engage them in the group chat. Literally ghosted. They didn’t even bother checking on us whether we came and sat nicely at the office working or we decided to chill at the mall drinking some cappuccino for the remaining office hours.

My bosses would also contact us at odd hours to discuss work because they seemed too occupied by other many things during the working hours.

Red flag #3: horrible communication and inattentiveness

One of my bosses tended to ask the same questions all over again for the same problems that were supposed to have been resolved some time ago. He also liked to blabber about things that had nothing to do with the work and inquire about more irrelevant things that we the creative marketing team had no power and knowledge to resolve.

One day, we uploaded a new video on Instagram and as usual, we edited everything in the highest quality to make sure the video was in 4K. My boss knocked on our WhatsApp to review the content, which had been uploaded since morning, at 10:00 pm.

While he said he was impressed with our work, he asked why the quality of the content was yet to be 4K. I was perplexed because this had been discussed so many times. I said,

“I thought we have moved on from this issue? I have explained to you and even cited articles as to why Instagram randomly compresses the resolution. You should take into account the device you’re using to view the content as well.” (For the record, he viewed the reels (optimized for mobile devices) via a computer.)

He kept responding with the same thing he had said the other day (that clearly didn’t help) when we specifically discussed this matter for the first time so I started losing patience. I replied, “but honestly it does seem like you’re accusing us of not setting the resolution to the highest quality.”

He immediately became defensive and called me out for being too sensitive and ungrateful for his compliment.

No, employees don’t need to be praised for doing the bare minimum. We are not volunteers or family members who willingly offer a helping hand.

Red flag #4: Indecisive, full of doubts, and painstakingly passive

Indecisive people make horrible bosses because they themselves have no freaking idea in which direction they want to take their business. As a result, they would overthink and doubt their actions too much and it causes significant delays in almost every aspect of the business. If they’re already so overwhelmed with the decision-making aspects, how would they have the time and energy left to manage their employees and expectations, especially in social media marketing? After all, you need to get your business right first before diving into digital marketing and content creation.

I recently found out that it took them almost THREE weeks to fully analyze their product and sales performances alone. I told them that was ridiculous and that this wouldn’t work out in the long run. The pace was way too slow and it seemed like they were not ready at all to scale their business further.

At that moment, I understood why they never followed up on most of my major proposals for the past 3 months I worked there. Influencer marketing campaigns, social media marketing tool subscriptions, video shooting, digital ads, e-commerce live streaming. None were ever executed, they were just a bunch of ideas sitting nicely on Google Slides and WhatsApp texts.

Lesson to be learned

Having a job is not just for paying off the bills. I could have just watched Netflix for the rest of the day after getting a 30–60 minutes worth of workload done and waited for my salary until payday comes. Working a job is about improving your quality of life and your Being. It is about how to survive in the midst of this cruel world we live in. It doesn’t matter if you’re the child of the wealthiest person on Earth. You still need to learn and upgrade your marketable skills. You can’t feed off the fish that is passed down to you by your daddy forever. Eventually, you need to know how to use the fishing rod.

Maybe my boss was right, I don’t need money because my father can provide me with a lot more than my current salary. That’s exactly why I quit; how is it any different from me just staying at home with my family, idling around? The thing is, I can’t financially depend on my parents forever because one day they will get old and need to retire.

A laid-back boss who lets you do whatever you want (with no professional command or procedure to follow) is NOT a blessing; it is just as dangerous to your career development as everything else. At the very least, having to do overtime may still suggest you’re working hard to achieve something within the company, to a certain extent.

From this experience, I have also learned to appreciate a long-winded recruitment process more. It consists of many stages for a good reason. But that’s for another different article next time.

In the meantime, I have settled for a new job with a higher salary that is about to begin the following week. Hopefully, it is a lot better than this one. I will never desperately accept job offers that seem too good to be true or are given to me liberally without an HR specialist’s interference again.

“Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.”