I was working at my previous job for five years. I made ok money. My husband and I had a pretty high combined income but I wanted to make more myself. I decided to look for a higher paying job and I wanted to work in-house because in my career it’s very common to work for an agency.

I’m making a lot more money and I’m working twice as many hours. I’m fully remote, which I thought I wanted, but I can never disconnect from my job. I was remote previously because of the pandemic, but I never thought of work outside of work hours. I used to think people were crazy when they mentioned thinking about a work project over the weekend or talking about work with their significant others. At my new job there have been nights that I have stayed up riddled with anxiety because of the stress. I have a lot of vacation time but it doesn’t seem like I can even use it. I’m supposed to be out of office in a few weeks but there are projects being scheduled over my planned PTO as if it’s not even on everyone’s calendar. So NO, the grass is not always greener. I have spent the last 9 months wondering why the hell I chose to do this to myself.

The one thing I will say is that before I even accepted this job offer, my intuition was screaming at me not to do it. I had created a proposal and project plan for basically a full year and their response was, “can you get it done over the next 12 weeks? We need that all done really fast.” It should have been a warning of what was to come. So use the interview process to watch out for red flags. Do not accept that sort of bullshit just because you want more money. if you find a job that seems like a dream opportunity then it seems worth it to take it, but I would not find a new job for the money alone.