Feeling Stuck at Work? A Psychodynamic Understanding of Career Dissatisfaction in Young Adulthood
Psychotherapy for Young Adults in San Francisco
Questions Many Young Adults Quietly Ask Themselves
Do you ever feel a sense of dread before starting your workday, even though your job looks “good” on paper?
Do you find yourself scrolling through job postings in between meetings, not because you know what you want next, but because something about your current role feels deeply misaligned?
Have you achieved what you thought you wanted—especially in a city like San Francisco—only to find it feels strangely empty?
In my psychotherapy practice in San Francisco, I hear these concerns frequently from young adults in tech, finance, healthcare, nonprofits, academia, and the arts. Feeling stuck at work in your 20s or 30s is not a personal defect. Often, it’s a sign that a deeper developmental and psychological process is underway.
Emerging adulthood research (Jeffrey Arnett’s work on the 18–29 age range) describes this stage as one of exploration, instability, and identity formation—not a time when everything is supposed to be fully settled. In that sense, career dissatisfaction is often less about failure and more about growth.
Why Career Dissatisfaction Emerges: A Clinical and Developmental Perspective
Career dissatisfaction in young adulthood is rarely just “I don’t like my job.” More often, it reflects a conflict between internal needs (values, identity, emotional life) and external demands (family expectations, economic realities, local culture—especially intense in San Francisco).
Below are several clinically relevant mechanisms I see repeatedly in my work with young adults here.
1. Role Conformity and the “Safe Path”
Many of my clients in San Francisco describe having chosen “safe” or prestigious paths—software engineering, product management, consulting, medicine—not always because those careers felt alive, but because they fit a narrative about success.
Psychodynamically, this often reflects introjected parental and cultural expectations: beliefs about stability, status, and respectability taken in from caregivers and social contexts. Over time, the performed self (“the person I am at work”) may feel increasingly distant from the experienced self (“who I feel I am internally”).
This gap echoes what self-discrepancy theory (Higgins, 1987) describes: the distress that emerges when there is a sustained mismatch between the “actual self,” “ought self,” and “ideal self.” In practice, this can look like:
feeling accomplished but not fulfilled
feeling guilty for wanting something different
staying in a role because it makes sense on paper, even as it drains you emotionally
2. Lack of Reflective Space During Key Transitions
The transition from full-time education into full-time work is often rapid, particularly in cities like San Francisco where opportunities can appear—and vanish—quickly. Many young adults move directly from structured academic environments into demanding jobs without any meaningful pause to reflect on:
what motivates them
what sort of work is sustainable
how they want their life to feel day to day
From a developmental perspective, this creates a timing gap: role commitments (job, salary, title, location) solidify before identity has fully taken shape. This is consistent with Arnett’s framing of emerging adulthood as a period where identity exploration is still very active—even as adult responsibilities begin.
3. Burnout and Perfectionistic Internal Demands
In San Francisco, burnout is almost normalized. High workloads, rapid product cycles, tight funding climates, and the constant pressure to “scale” or “optimize” can wear people down—even when they like the content of their work.
Research by Maslach and Leiter on burnout highlights three core components: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced sense of accomplishment. Clinically, I often see these mapped onto:
ongoing fatigue and irritability
feeling detached or cynical about projects
difficulty feeling proud of any achievement
At a psychodynamic level, burnout is often driven by relentless superego demands—an internal voice that insists you must always be more productive, more valuable, more impressive. In a city where so many people tie identity to work, these inner pressures become particularly intense.
4. Shifting Values and the Emergence of the “Real Self”
As people move through their late 20s and 30s, their values frequently shift. What once felt exciting—status, speed, the novelty of a new role or company—may start to feel less compelling. This often reflects what Winnicott called the tension between the “false self” (adapted to external demands) and the “true self” (aligned with inner emotional reality).
In San Francisco, I frequently see clients who:
initially moved for a prestigious role or “dream job”
built much of their identity around achievement
later begin to question whether their life is organized around their own desires or around what they believed they should want
Career dissatisfaction becomes a sign that the “real self” is asking for greater participation in decision-making.
5. Comparison Culture and Perceived Failure
In a city where people talk openly about fundraising rounds, promotions, exits, and accelerators, it’s easy to feel behind. Social media amplifies this—turning peers’ highlight reels into a distorted baseline.
Self-discrepancy theory and the broader literature on social comparison consistently show that chronic upward comparison (“everyone else is more successful than I am”) intensifies anxiety, shame, and stagnation. In therapy, this often sounds like:
“I’m doing fine, but everyone else is doing better.”
“I should be further along.”
“I can’t tell if I want a different career or if I just feel pressure to keep up.”
This is less about objective reality and more about internalized metrics of worth—metrics that can be examined and revised.
Signs You’re at a Developmental Turning Point (Not a Dead End)
In my experience, young adults in San Francisco often seek therapy when they notice some of the following:
emotional detachment or boredom at work
dread that feels disproportionate to the actual tasks of the job
a sense of living someone else’s version of success
inability to imagine staying in their current role long-term
recurring fantasies about doing something entirely different, without a clear picture of what that is
Clinically, these are not signs of irresponsibility or “not being resilient enough.” They are indicators that something in your internal world is no longer willing to be organized solely around external expectations.
How Psychodynamic Therapy Helps: A Technical View
Psychotherapy does not tell you which job to take or whether to stay in your current role. Instead, it helps you understand why you feel the way you do, and how to move toward choices that are psychologically coherent.
1. Mapping Internal Conflicts Around Work and Identity
We explore the unconscious and semi-conscious conflicts that influence your career:
fears of disappointing parents or mentors
loyalty to family sacrifices (“I can’t walk away after all they did”)
ambivalence about success or visibility
anxiety about stability, scarcity, or failure
This is not about blame. It’s about understanding the emotional “architecture” of your decisions.
2. Examining Early Narratives About Work and Worth
Family narratives about work—spoken and unspoken—play a major role in how young adults in San Francisco relate to their careers. In therapy, we look at:
how success and failure were talked about (or not talked about)
whether rest was permitted or pathologized
how emotions were handled in times of stress or change
This allows for differentiation between internalized voices and your own emerging perspective.
3. Softening Perfectionism and Superego Rigidity
Many of my clients describe an internal standard that never relaxes. There is always more to do, more to prove, more to optimize. This is not simply “high standards”; it’s often a punitive superego position.
Through psychodynamic work—and often drawing on research around self-compassion (Kristin Neff’s work is relevant here)—we gradually move from relentless self-monitoring toward a more nuanced, humane relationship with yourself. This shift often opens up creativity and new possibilities.
4. Supporting Genuine Meaning-Making
Therapy provides a structured, protected space to ask questions that daily life in San Francisco rarely makes time for:
“What do I find genuinely interesting or meaningful?”
“What kind of life am I building around my work?”
“What do I want my days—and not just my résumé—to look and feel like?”
This meaning-making process draws from existential and psychodynamic traditions, where work is understood not just as income, but as one expression of identity and purpose.
5. Facilitating Thoughtful Transitions Instead of Impulsive Escapes
It’s common, especially in a high-pressure environment, to fantasize about quitting everything and starting fresh. Therapy slows this down—not to suppress change, but to help ensure that any change is integrative, not reactive.
Over time, clients often find that clarity about their internal world naturally leads to clearer external decisions—whether that means reshaping their relationship to their current role, exploring new paths within their field, or making more significant shifts.
San Francisco Context: Why This Work Matters Here
San Francisco compresses many pressures into a small geographic area: cost of living, intense work culture, rapid changes in industries, a high concentration of ambitious peers, and relatively few natural pauses. For young adults, this can blur the line between:
living intentionally
and being carried along by the momentum of the city
Psychotherapy with young adults here often involves disentangling who you are from where you happen to be and what the environment rewards. That disentangling is a crucial step in building a career—and a life—that feels like your own.
You Deserve Work That Aligns With Who You Are Becoming
Feeling stuck, uninspired, or misaligned at work is not evidence that you’re failing. It’s often evidence that your internal world is evolving faster than the external structures around you.
If you are a young adult in San Francisco feeling disconnected from your work, uncertain about your next step, or ambivalent about the path you’re on, therapy for young adults can offer a space to understand why—and to begin moving toward something that fits more truthfully.
When you’re ready, we can begin the work of exploring not only what you do, but who you are becoming in the process.
