Clickbait, I know. But that’s exactly what I told myself this morning, staring at the ceiling at 6am, stiff, wide awake after a sleepless night. No cake. No gift. No income either — I was the one who asked my wife not to buy anything. Money is tight, I’d rather she keeps it. I get by with little, and honestly, I’m fine with that. What keeps me up at night is not the missing candle on a cake. It’s everything else. At night, when my mind won’t stop, it’s not deep philosophical questions. It’s numbers. End of month bills, rent, savings going down slowly, like a candle you watch melt without being able to stop it. Calculations I run ten times, hoping the result will be different. It never is. And sometimes, between two numbers, another thought comes. No kids. It’s not the right time. It’s never been the right time. In the morning, I’m the first one up. I make her bento — so she has something to eat at work. Some vegetables, rice, whatever we have. (She’s the real cook, not me.) It’s something I genuinely enjoy doing for her. And sometimes, while I close the box, I think that I hope I won’t have to do this forever — not because I don’t like this small gesture, but because it would mean she could buy lunch at work, that I’d have found income again, that we could breathe. That would be a nice reason to stop. I count the coffee capsules. Two left. I count them because I have to be careful with everything right now, and every thing I use in this home weighs on me quietly — a small invisible debt that nobody asks me to pay, but that I track alone in my head. She leaves for work. I stay strong until she disappears from my sight. And then, once the door is closed, I fall back down. The morning silence is not peace. It’s the confirmation that today will look like yesterday. The cat wants his premium food. I serve him. We’re even. Forty-four years old. Eight years since my career change. What really taught me things was not my diploma or my master’s degree — money I spent that I never saw in my bank account, and in the end nothing that really helped me. What formed me is the accumulation. And accumulation is hard to explain to someone who hasn’t lived it. It’s not one big failure. It’s a series of small erosions, each one reasonable on its own, but that dig something deep when they keep repeating. First job: my manager announces she’s leaving during my first week. I find myself alone, learning a profession with no guidance, surrounded by people who don’t know the field. I don’t make it a drama. I learn. I move forward. That’s what I do. Second job: marketing manager for an investment platform. No website, no tools, no team. I build everything — landing pages, an inbound marketing system, a sales pipeline. 500,000 francs in potential revenue generated in a few months, alone, with no support. I’m proud. Really proud. And then one day, in a meeting, I hear myself introduced to clients as “the guy who makes Facebook posts.” I said nothing. I smiled. A few months later, I’m fired, replaced by an agency of five people. Five people to do what I was doing alone. I went home that evening and I took it. Third job: I really loved this one. I managed client accounts and they were making money. But the salary promises were never kept. I held on anyway, because you hold on when you love what you do. Until the day the entire marketing department was shut down at once. Same reason for everyone. Economic reasons. As if a collective reason made it less personal. Last employer: I move from Wallis to Zurich. Beautiful city, good project, real promise this time — or at least that’s what I told myself to make the move feel brave rather than naive. On my second day, my manager tells me she’s leaving the company. Burnout. Professional exhaustion. She looks relieved to go. And I stay there, nodding, saying it will be fine, that I’ll adapt. Seven months later, I’m told my German isn’t good enough. That I’m no longer part of the strategy. I decide to stay and keep applying. I get several interviews. My profile interests people, I regularly make it to the third round, but it doesn’t work out. I come back home. I keep looking but there’s nothing on the horizon, the job market is in bad shape. Even supermarkets ghost me… And yes — I ask myself the question. All the time. Am I the problem? I would be dishonest to say no. But when I try to look at things honestly, here is what I see: every time, I delivered. Every time, the structures around me collapsed before I did. Companies that hire without knowing what they need, that promise without delivering, that shut things down without explaining. That’s not an excuse — it’s an observation. In a healthy organisation, with a clear vision, this post wouldn’t exist. I would be replying to your comments with a project that’s running well. But here we are. So my answer to that question is to keep learning. Again. Always. During my unemployment, I passed my B2 in German, built my personal brand, launched a YouTube channel, published children’s books, learned Docker, n8n, Coolify, ran a local LLM, slowly got back into sport even though an old injury still follows me around. I’ve been building and learning. I just saw that Claude.ai has an academy — I’m going to look into it, because that’s all I know how to do when the ground moves: keep building. Except that building without being recognised ends up feeling different. My terminal open at 11pm, my automations, my pipelines — from the outside, it looks like someone playing on a computer. Just a hobby. At home, something has shifted slowly, quietly, without us really talking about it. I do the dishes, the laundry, I cook, I iron, I prepare the bento, I do the shopping… But when you’re unemployed, you’re available — so naturally, you become available for everything, all the time, like a workflow running on a loop. It’s not a conscious decision on her part. It’s a slow slide. And one day you find yourself wondering what your place is here, in this apartment you maintain but no longer pay for. You look at the cat — ten kilos, premium food, zero existential questions — and you think he’s doing pretty well. 🤣 No kids. Lucky, maybe — there’s not much to put on their plate right now. Unlucky, probably — because I want to be a father one day. Not a sentence I write often. But there it is. So, for those of you who have a job and complain about impossible targets, demanding clients, random meetings, weekends that are too short — just know that somewhere, there’s someone who has none of those problems. Be grateful. Genuinely. Not in a condescending way — just take a moment to realise it. I have my health. But this morning, closing my wife’s bento box, staying strong until she disappeared from my sight, I really would have liked there to be a gift somewhere. submitted by /u/Frosty-Specific4977
Originally posted by u/Frosty-Specific4977 on r/Switzerland