Why We Stay Too Long: The Sunk Cost Fallacy in Career Redesign

You’ve done everything right. You worked hard, specialized, built credibility. You made the choices that led you to success — or at least, what was supposed to feel like success. But now, something’s off. The Sunday anxiety is constant, creativity is gone, and your energy feels permanently drained.

When I sit down with lawyers, musicians, and other professionals, this is the point where job crafting — adjusting projects, clients, or routines — stops helping. The system itself is the problem: the boss, the culture, the stagnation, the values mismatch. And yet, almost every client says the same thing:

“I’ve already invested too much to quit now.”

That sentence is a textbook case of the sunk cost fallacy — one of the most powerful mental traps in career decision-making.

What the Sunk Cost Fallacy Really Means

In behavioral economics, a sunk cost is any past investment of time, money, or energy that can’t be recovered. Rationally, those costs shouldn’t influence our next decision — because they’re gone. But in practice, they do.

We stay in bad jobs, failing projects, or entire careers because walking away feels like wasting everything we’ve put in. Harvard Business School notes that this bias leads people to “base decisions on past investments rather than future value” (HBS Online, 2021).

That’s why a lawyer keeps billing hours in a firm that crushes them. Why a concert musician keeps touring despite burnout. Why an academic clings to tenure even when the work has lost all meaning.

We mistake endurance for loyalty and suffering for commitment.

The Psychology Behind Staying

The sunk cost fallacy doesn’t live in spreadsheets — it lives in identity.
Research from The Decision Lab (2022) shows that humans are “loss averse”: we feel the pain of losing something roughly twice as strongly as we feel the joy of gaining something new. When your career is also your identity, the perceived loss is existential.

This is especially strong among high-education, high-investment professions like law, academia, and the arts. These fields reward perseverance and sacrifice, which reinforces the idea that leaving equals failing. But as Times Higher Education (2023) points out, this loyalty can backfire: “We can become so invested in the path that we stop designing the future.”

Three psychological mechanisms make this trap sticky:

• Loss aversion – We fear “wasting” effort more than missing new opportunities.

• Identity attachment – “I am a lawyer / musician / professor” becomes non-negotiable.

• Social validation – Others see your achievements, so quitting feels like letting them down.

When these combine, the result is paralysis: staying busy in a role you’ve outgrown while calling it “responsibility.”

The Emotional Cost of Sunk Costs

Burnout often masquerades as discipline. You convince yourself that being exhausted means you’re still trying — but often, it means you’re avoiding change. A recent LinkedIn Pulse article by Tom Seaman (2023) describes how professionals “keep investing emotional energy into roles that no longer fit, mistaking familiarity for fulfillment.”

Over time, this manifests as cynicism, detachment, and reduced self-efficacy — the classic burnout triad. In law, it shows up as irritability and tunnel vision; in the arts, as creative numbness; in academia, as quiet resentment.

Letting go is not weakness — it’s cognitive clarity.

Escaping the Trap: Design Thinking for Real Life

The good news is that you don’t have to quit everything to reclaim your agency. The principles of design thinking — test, prototype, learn — apply beautifully to career redesign.

Here’s how to do it, step by step:

1. Rest first. Fatigue exaggerates fear. You can’t make strategic decisions when your brain is in survival mode. Take real rest — not just Netflix recovery.

2. Reduce workload. You need cognitive bandwidth to think. Negotiate, delegate, or drop low-value tasks.

3. Think gradual, not radical. You don’t have to “jump off the cliff.” Start exploring through side projects, adjunct teaching, or volunteering.

4. Prototype your future. Talk to people doing the work you admire (informational interviews are gold). Shadow them, audit a course, or do a short-term assignment. Collect data on what energizes you.

5. Start now. Don’t wait for certainty; start for clarity. Small actions test assumptions better than long reflections.

As design researcher Bill Burnett puts it, “You can’t think your way into a new life; you can only build your way forward.”

Redefine “Wasted”

When clients tell me they fear wasting their degree, I remind them: you don’t lose your skills by changing direction — you recontextualize them.

• A litigator becomes a mediator and finally sleeps at night.

• A musician becomes a project manager in a cultural nonprofit and thrives.

• A corporate lawyer becomes a policy advisor and regains purpose.

The sunk costs of your past aren’t liabilities — they’re inputs for your redesign.

Final Thought

The hardest part of change isn’t letting go of your job; it’s letting go of the story that says your worth equals your investment.

You’ve already proven you can commit. The next step is proving you can redirect.

Because staying miserable just to honor the past isn’t loyalty — it’s inertia disguised as integrity.