Why "I've put too much in to leave now" is the one feeling to distrust.
Sooner or later, most working lives arrive at the same quiet crossroads. The job isn’t terrible. It pays, the people are fine, you know how everything works. But something has gone flat — you’ve stopped learning, or stopped caring, or you can feel a version of your career that you’re not living. And every time you seriously think about leaving, the same sentence rises up to stop you: I’ve put too much into this to walk away now.
Eight years in this company. A degree you went into debt for. The reputation you spent a decade building in an industry you’re no longer sure you want to be in. It feels like all of that is on the scale, and walking away means throwing it in the bin.
Here’s the uncomfortable part. That feeling — the one that sounds like loyalty, like maturity, like not being a quitter — is, more often than not, the least trustworthy input in the whole decision. There’s a name for it, there’s sixty years of research behind it, and once you can see it working, it loses most of its grip.
In 1985 two psychologists, Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer, ran a now-famous experiment. They asked people to imagine they’d bought a ticket for a weekend ski trip to Michigan for $100. Then, by mistake, they’d bought a ticket for a better weekend ski trip — to Wisconsin — for $50. The two trips are on the same weekend; the tickets can’t be refunded or resold. And, the participants are told, you actually expect to enjoy the cheaper Wisconsin trip more.
Which do you go on?
The rational answer is obvious when it’s someone else’s money: go on the trip you’ll enjoy more. The $150 is already gone either way; the only live question is which weekend is better. And yet more than half of people chose the more expensive Michigan trip — the one they expected to enjoy less — purely to avoid the feeling of “wasting” the larger sum.
That is the sunk-cost effect: the pull to keep going with something because of what you’ve already put in, even when a clear-eyed look at what’s ahead says stop. Arkes and Blumer found it again and again, with money, with time, with effort. It’s one of the most reliably reproduced findings in the study of how people decide. The money, the time, the effort already spent and not coming back — economists call that sunk — and the cold logic is that it should be irrelevant to what you do next. Only the costs and benefits still in front of you should count. People know this about a ski trip. They forget it completely about a career.
The reason the career version is so much harder is that the stakes aren’t a hundred dollars — they’re your twenties, or your professional identity, or the years you told yourself the sacrifice would be worth it. And the sunk-cost effect has a crueller big brother that kicks in exactly there. Researchers call it escalation of commitment: the more you’ve already poured into a course of action, the harder it becomes to stop, regardless of how the prospects actually look from here. The investment doesn’t just fail to protect you. It actively pulls you to invest more in the thing that isn’t working.
What drives it isn’t a careful weighing of the future. It’s the wish not to have been wrong — not to look at the years and call them wasted. Staying lets you avoid that reckoning for a little longer. Leaving forces you to face it now. So the mind quietly reframes “I should go” into “I can’t go, look how much I’ve put in,” and calls the result wisdom.
It helps to know how ordinary leaving actually is. In the United States alone, around three million people quit a job in a single month — that’s not a recession statistic or a crisis, it’s a routine month (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, figures for February 2026). People leave constantly, and the overwhelming majority of them are fine. The catastrophe your sunk-cost feeling is bracing against is, for most people most of the time, not what happens. Yet for every person who goes, far more rehearse the decision for months or years and stay — held, in no small part, by a sum of money and time that left the table long ago.
Now the important caveat, because this is where the idea gets misused. “Ignore what you’ve already spent” is not the same as “quit whenever you’re bored,” and a sharp reader will already be objecting: sometimes finishing the thing genuinely is worth it. Right.
The test is direction. A true sunk cost points backwards — it’s gone, unrecoverable, and the only reason it’s tugging at you is that walking away means admitting it’s gone. A real future cost, by contrast, points forwards: you’re two units short of a qualification that will open real doors, or another six months earns a vesting payment or a credential that travels. That isn’t sunk-cost thinking; that’s a forward benefit that happens to require finishing. The work is to tell them apart honestly — and the tell is simple. Ask: am I staying for something this choice will still get me, or only to honour something it already cost me? The first is a reason. The second is the trap wearing the costume of a reason.
It’s also worth separating this from a feeling it’s often confused with. The dread of giving up the familiar — the salary, the title, the routine you’d lose — is a different mechanism (loss aversion, which we’ve written about before). That’s the fear of what leaving takes away. Sunk cost is the opposite direction in time: the pull of what staying has already cost. Both can be in the room at once. Naming which one is talking is half the battle.
So suppose you look squarely at what’s ahead and accept that the years behind you don’t get a vote. You’re still not condemned to a single move. One of the most useful frameworks here is sixty years old and comes from the economist Albert Hirschman, who pointed out that when something you’re part of starts to deteriorate, you really have three responses — not one.
There’s exit: you leave. There’s voice: you stay, but you actively push to change the thing that isn’t working — you raise it, you renegotiate the role, you try to repair what’s broken from the inside. And there’s loyalty: you consciously choose to stay and wait, because you have good reason to believe it’s worth giving more time. Hirschman’s insight was that these are real, distinct options, and that people tend to lurch into one of them — usually a panicked exit or a resentful, passive staying — without registering that they had a menu.
The move is to make the choice on purpose, and to make it on forward grounds. Have you actually used your voice yet — said plainly what would need to change for you to stay, and given it a fair run? Is your loyalty a real bet on a future you can name, or just inertia and sunk cost in a nicer outfit? Is exit a considered call about what’s ahead, or a flinch? The framework doesn’t tell you which to pick. It stops you from sleepwalking into one and calling it the only option you had.
If you take one thing from all of this, let it be a single swap in how the decision gets framed. Stop asking how much have I already put in? — and start asking from here, knowing what I know now, would I choose this again?
That’s the question The Handbook Co. is built around. On the surface we publish handbooks for the moments a working life turns on — leaving a job, the comeback after a layoff, changing fields, the interview. Underneath, we’re working out, slowly and in public, how good decisions actually get made, so the experience is there for you to borrow when it’s your turn to make one. If you’re standing at the leave-or-stay crossroads right now, the Rebound Handbook walks through the decision and the first moves after it in detail — and there’s a free one-page version of these questions to start with. But the reframe is yours to keep whether you ever open them: what you’ve already spent is spent. Decide on what’s still ahead.
— Jon, The Handbook Co.
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