Katya, 25, often leaves a job after six months to look for better work or start a business. Psychologist Lilia Levitskaya says she can assess those choices without treating each stalled plan as personal failure.
Her finances sometimes improve before Katya quits and starts over. Yet she says a job can begin to feel insufficient, and she finds herself looking for a better option before leaving.
At 25, Katya sees the pattern as proof that she is sabotaging her own progress. She has moved and changed other parts of her life, but says she ends up in a similar place: stuck, and telling herself she should be doing more and earning more. When she leaves, she hopes to find better work or start a business. Then she blames herself when she lacks the experience to make the new plan work.
Lilia Levitskaya, an integrative psychologist and psychotherapist, cautions against turning several different experiences into one sweeping judgment. Calling it something that “always happens” can make it harder for Katya to see what she has learned. Her account does not establish why Katya leaves each position, or whether starting a business is the right move. Levitskaya’s advice is to assess each decision without reducing it to personal failure.
Start with a record of each job. Katya can note what she learned, then write separately about what did not work and what she would want from a future role. A short tenure can still leave her with useful skills or a clearer sense of her workplace preferences.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures put median tenure with a current employer at 3.0 years in January 2026 for workers aged 25 to 34. For workers aged 55 to 64, it was 9.6 years. The median across wage and salary workers was 4.1 years. Those figures measure time with one employer, not time in a career or profession, according to the BLS tenure report.
Restlessness is worth examining before Katya treats it as a flaw. She says life feels gray when she stays in one place without traveling. Levitskaya suggests that moving quickly between settings may reflect an ability to adapt. Katya can consider whether that preference fits her strengths and practical limits.
A related account of workplace strain looks at the cost of suppressing reactions on the job. Katya’s situation is different, but both accounts raise the question of what a job demands from the person doing it. For her, the task is to separate a specific problem at work from the broader feeling that nothing is enough.
A study of job mobility in Britain tracked 81,161 workers. It recorded 22,836 individual moves between employers, alongside 21,549 job changes linked to employers leaving the market. Workers who moved individually tended to be younger and were less likely to hold sector-specific qualifications, according to the British Journal of Industrial Relations study. A move between jobs alone does not show whether someone changed professions or what they gained from it.
Repeated self-criticism can drain the energy Katya needs to learn a new role or develop an idea, Levitskaya says. She advises supporting herself while trying something unfamiliar, and gathering experience before judging the outcome. When she needs guidance, she can seek help. In a Civey survey of 5,000 people aged 18 to 29, conducted for Taxfix on July 21 to 23, 2026, 19% named self-employment the safest career model. The figure was 11% among respondents aged 30 to 39. Among those over 40, it was 4%, according to Merkur’s coverage.
