The Circumstance Change Fallacy

I'd always wanted to live in a particular city. For years, it was the someday dream. Someday I'll move there. Someday everything will be different.

Then I got the chance. My job went fully remote—I'd been successful enough that they didn't care where I sat. I could work from anywhere. So I moved.

New city. New apartment. New coffee shops. New streets to walk. Everything I'd imagined.

I'd changed my circumstances. I hadn't changed anything else.

The Fallacy

Here's what I believed, though I never would have said it out loud: if I just change this one thing—the city, the commute, the office, the remote status—everything else will fall into place.

It's a seductive belief. It feels actionable. You can see the change. You can plan for it. Moving to a new city is concrete. "Becoming more self-aware" is not.

But the belief is often wrong.

I call it the Circumstance Change Fallacy: the expectation that altering your external situation will fundamentally alter your internal experience.

Sometimes it does. But often—especially when the internal experience is the real problem—it doesn't.

Wherever You Go, There You Are

There's an old saying: wherever you go, there you are.

It sounds like a bumper sticker. But it captures something real.

When you change jobs, you bring yourself. Your patterns. Your tendencies. Your unexamined assumptions about what work should feel like. Your relationship with stress, with conflict, with boredom, with meaning.

When you move cities, you bring yourself. Your social habits. Your ways of filling time. Your capacity for connection or isolation.

When you go remote, you bring yourself. Your self-discipline. Your need for structure. Your relationship with loneliness.

I moved to my dream city and discovered that the dream city wasn't the problem. The job I could do from anywhere was still the job I hated. The location was irrelevant.

When Circumstance Change Works

I don't want to be too cynical here. Sometimes changing your circumstances genuinely helps.

When the circumstance is actually the problem. If your commute is two hours each way and it's destroying your life, going remote might genuinely fix things. If your boss is abusive and you get a new boss, the abuse stops. If your company is chaotic and you move to a stable one, the chaos ends.

When the change creates space for other changes. Sometimes a new environment gives you breathing room to think. You're not in survival mode anymore. You can reflect. The circumstance change didn't fix you, but it created conditions where fixing yourself became possible.

When you've done the internal work first. If you understand what you actually need—not what you think you need, but what you actually need—then changing circumstances to align with that need can be powerful. The change is intentional, not escapist.

When It Doesn't Work

When you're running from something rather than toward something. If your primary motivation is "I need to get out of here," you haven't actually figured out what you need. You just know you don't want this. That's useful information, but it's not a plan.

When the problem is you. This is hard to hear, but sometimes the problem really is internal. Your relationship with work. Your expectations. Your inability to set boundaries. Your tendency to overcommit. Your need for external validation. These things follow you.

When you haven't diagnosed the real issue. Remember Part 2 of this series—there are many reasons you might hate your job. If you misdiagnose the reason and change the wrong circumstance, you'll hate the new situation for the same underlying reason.

When you expect magic. "Everything will be different when I..." is almost always a fantasy. Some things will be different. Many things won't. The question is whether the things that change are the things that actually matter.

The Passivity Problem

Here's what I've come to believe: most of us got into our current situation through passivity.

We followed the path. We did what was expected. We took the job that was offered. We stayed because staying was easier than leaving. We let momentum carry us.

The pattern that got you here—letting external circumstances shape your life—is the same pattern you're using to try to escape. And it leads to the same result: a life that happens to you rather than one you build.

What Intentionality Looks Like

The alternative is intentionality. Actually figuring out what you want. Actually understanding what's wrong. Actually making changes that address the real problem.

This is harder than changing circumstances. It requires self-awareness, which takes time. It requires honesty, which can be painful. It requires action that might not have obvious, concrete steps.

But it's the only thing that actually works.

Intentional change looks like:

• Understanding why you hate your job before you start looking for a new one
• Knowing what you need to be different, specifically, in the next role
• Recognizing patterns across your work history—what has consistently drained you, what has consistently energized you
• Being honest about your own contributions to your unhappiness
• Making changes because they align with what you've learned, not because they're different from what you have

Circumstantial change without this foundation is just rearranging deck chairs.

The Information Problem

Here's a reframe that might help: every circumstance change, whether it works or not, gives you information.

If you change jobs and you're happier, you learned something about what was wrong with the old job.

If you change jobs and you're just as miserable, you learned something too. The job wasn't the problem—or at least, not the whole problem.

If you move cities and feel better, location mattered more than you thought.

If you move cities and feel the same, location wasn't it.

This isn't failure. It's data.

You have to walk through what the problem isn't to find out what it really is. But you have to actually learn from each step, not just keep walking.

My Path Through This

After I moved to my dream city and nothing changed, I had a choice.

I could blame the city. Maybe it wasn't actually what I wanted. Maybe I needed to move somewhere else.

Or I could finally face what was actually wrong.

The city was fine. The remote work was fine. The problem was that I was doing work I didn't care about, in a role that didn't fit me, and I'd been doing it for years. Moving didn't change that. Nothing external could change that.

The only thing that could change it was me deciding to change it. Not my circumstances—my actual work. My relationship with what I did all day.

That took longer. It was harder. But it actually worked.

What This Means for You

If you're thinking about a big change—a new job, a move, going remote, going back to the office—ask yourself some questions:

What specifically do you expect to be different? Not vaguely better. Specifically different. What about your current situation do you believe is the problem, and how does this change address it?

Is this change running from or toward? Are you escaping something, or are you pursuing something? Both can be valid, but escape alone isn't a strategy.

Have you done the diagnostic work? Do you actually understand what's wrong with your current situation? Or are you guessing?

What have you learned from previous changes? If this isn't your first job change, what happened last time? Did it help? Why or why not?

Are you expecting magic? Be honest. Is there a part of you that believes everything will be different after this change, without being able to articulate why?

The goal isn't to avoid change. Change might be exactly what you need. The goal is to make change intentional—to know what you're changing and why, and to have realistic expectations about what it will and won't accomplish.

The Harder Path

I wish I could tell you that the right circumstance change will fix everything. That there's a job out there, a city out there, a lifestyle out there that will make you happy without you having to do the hard work of understanding yourself.

Maybe there is. Some people get lucky.

But most of us need to do the work. We need to understand what we want, what drains us, what energizes us, what we're avoiding, what we're seeking. And then we need to make changes—circumstantial and otherwise—that align with that understanding.

Previous: Part 2: What Hating Your Job Actually Tells You