How prepared are you when you quit a job?
The 5 Hidden Functions you need to build beyond money
Whether your role was made redundant or you left the corporate world for good, you thought you were well prepared because you double- and triple-checked that your finances would work out ok.
How come you still feel devastated after that?
In the 1930s, there was a small industrial village called Marienthal near Vienna. Their entire economy depended on the one textile mill.
Then the Great Depression hit. The mill shut down, throwing the majority of the community into unemployment and leaving its 478 families devastated.
Marie Jahoda, an Austrian-British psychologist, and her team studied the unemployed community living there, collecting detailed life histories, tracking their meals, and even timing how fast people walked down the street.
They found some behaviors that poverty alone couldn't explain.
For example, the village library was made free as a support, yet book loans did not rise but drop significantly instead.
What held them back when money was not the problem?
TIMELESS Human Truths
A hundred years later, similar situations happen.
Many leaders, me included, felt a void after leaving the corporate world, whether planned or not. Many of us tried to make sense of it through money alone.
We thought it was because we worried about uncertainty. Maybe. But there are more reasons than that.
I left the corporate world 5 years ago. After years of reflections, observations, and conversations with leaders, I've found they are about identity, belonging, self-worth, time and validation. While doing some research, I found they are very close to Jahoda’s theory.
Decades after the Marienthal study, Jahoda developed a Latent Deprivation Theory in the 1980s to explain that losing a job harms mental health because unemployment takes away not only money, but also five hidden psychological benefits that work provides.
The 5 Hidden Functions
Let's go through how they might be formed in your work situation. They can help you reconcile where the psychological gap (aka devastation) is from.
Time Structure
Your time is full of meetings, calls, deep work time, and business events. Even when you schedule holidays, your schedule is packed with personal and family plans.
That’s why you often tell yourself and others, ‘I’m busy’.
From the day you don’t need to report to work, you don’t need to wake up early, and you don’t know when a public holiday is. They may make you feel uncomfortable because this is so unfamiliar.
You are free to do anything anytime at your own disposal. Except for your family members, no one gives you a timeline to follow. Suddenly, you are not busy but free and lost.
Social Contact
You spent a lot of time building relationships with colleagues, managers, teammates, business partners, vendors, boards, and peers in the same industry because of your role.
You might have lunch, dinner, drinks, or even travel with them pre- or post- a company summit. You have built a wide network of connections not just for work but for human connection.
Without a role, all social contacts disconnected overnight. There are not many reasons for people to stay connected.
If you are lucky, you might have built a handful of solid contacts you can connect with. But it will be once in a while. Not every day. Not every week. Not every month.
Think about how many people you connected with through your job. Then you can tell how big the void is in your sense of belonging.
Collective Purpose
You are employed to do the job to help a company achieve its goals.
Each job and project gives you meaning and purpose, regardless of whether it aligns with yours.
Working toward a shared purpose with your colleagues brings you a strong sense of purpose and meaningful impact. It can also bring you significant joy and satisfaction to accomplish something big together as a team despite the challenge.
When you lose a job, you lose the sense of purpose. Instead, you feel more self-doubt without any ‘big achievements’ to be made.
This applies no matter how many successes you have had before.
Status and Identity
You might have heard of this big question: Who are you if you are not your job title?
When you are working for someone, you used to introduce yourself as I’m a JOB ROLE and working in a COMPANY NAME.
When you don’t have a job, you also learnt to say nicely, “in between jobs”.
When you left the corporate world, you became confused and went blank…Am I Jobless? Unemployed? Retired (but not really)?
Kind people will correct you, saying you are ‘looking for a new adventure', but you feel the void.
And that brings you to the big question, which you have no answers to yet.
Regular Activity
You used to have loads to do. More than you can handle. You are either attending a meeting, checking and replying to emails. Or you could be thinking about a strategy, trying to solve a team’s problem, negotiating with your vendors.
The list goes on, including writing a strategy or board paper, having a team gathering, and a coffee chat with an industry partner.
Your To-Do list never ends and can easily overflow into your personal time.
When you don’t have a job, your never-ending TO-DO list disappears. You may still have some personal matters to manage, but the volume is far less than you handle at work.
You feel relaxed but also weird to have no reports to write, no reviews to do, no emails to reply. Then what do you do? Cooking? Gardening? Housekeeping?
Or spending more time with your family, but they also have their own plans?
Struggling from fighting against a long list yesterday to having nothing to do today creates the void.
Awareness is The First Step
As you can see, a job has more functions than just providing monetary return.
If they were the pillars of your life, you thought you were well prepared by managing one pillar (finance), and the other five collapsed overnight. Why wouldn’t you feel devastated?
So what can you do about that?
Being aware of the hidden psychological impact is the first step. You can understand why you feel what you feel without only rationalizing the fear of uncertainty.
Knowing that your feelings are normal. You are still safe with a home to live in. You are still capable of building a life you like.
All you need is to build these functions as a leader in your life, not as a leader in a company.
If you want me to share what you can consider to build these 5 functions, leave a comment.
Hope this article inspires you. If it does, do share with others because
~ WE RISE BY LIFTING OTHERS ~
Reference:
Beck, V., Warren, T. and Lyonette, C. (2025). Is any job better than no job? Utilising Jahoda's latent deprivation theory to reconceptualise underemployment. Work, Employment and Society.
Comments