“Job hugging” feels like safety. It’s not.
I’m a hiker, and have spent my share of time in the bush. I like to venture off the well-beaten paths, the kind of terrain where your phone loses signal around hour two.
Every hiker learns the same rule early: if you get lost, stop moving. Stay exactly where you are. Make yourself loud, make yourself visible, and wait. The moment you start wandering to “find your own way out,” you cover more ground, you make yourself harder to track, and you turn a rescue into a needle in a haystack.
It’s good advice. It’s kept people alive.
It’s also, I think, advice that’s quietly wrecking a lot of careers.
The Job Hugger
There’s a term making the rounds right now: “job hugging”. CBC did a piece on it recently — people who know, somewhere down deep, that their job no longer fits. Who’d take another option in a heartbeat if one showed up. But who won’t move. Won’t apply. Won’t even update the resume.
Not because they love the job. Because they’re scared to let go of it.
Sound familiar?
Fear Gets Louder When You Have No Bearing
The unwillingness to let go isn’t only about fear of the unknown. Fear gets much louder when you aren’t clear where you’re heading.
If you don’t know where you’re headed, every option looks equally risky. Leaving looks scary. Staying looks scary. So you default to the option that requires nothing of you: stay exactly where you are.
That’s the wilderness rule, misapplied. In the woods, staying put works because rescue is coming. Somebody’s actively searching for you.
Nobody is coming to find your career. There’s no search party for your Work. Stay frozen long enough, and nobody rescues you. You adapt to the campsite and begin calling it home.
There’s a difference between staying stuck and holding your position. One is avoidance. The other is strategy. You can remain in the same job while actively building the conditions for your next move. The danger isn’t staying. It’s staying without knowing why.
The Bill You’re Not Looking At
Staying without intention doesn’t feel like a decision. It feels like nothing is happening. That’s the trap.
While you’re camped out “playing it safe,” a gap is quietly compounding: the distance between who you could become and who your job actually lets you be. Every month you stay frozen in a role that no longer fits, that gap gets a little wider. It doesn’t show up on a bank statement. It shows up as the low hum of dread on Sunday night — the sense that you’re spending your best hours executing someone else’s plan for your life.
Your Job is the role someone pays you to perform. Your Work is the larger contribution, craft, or life you’re trying to build.
You can job-hug the hell out of your Job while starving your Work.
What I Had Instead of a Map
Several months ago, I got the letter most employees dread: “your services may no longer be required.” I didn’t panic and I didn’t scramble. Months later, when the early retirement package I was hoping for became available, I signed the same day.
That wasn’t bravery. It wasn’t even really a decision in the moment — the decision had already been made.
I didn’t have the whole thing mapped out. I didn’t know exactly how I’d build this business, or exactly what it’d look like a year out. What I had was a compass — a clear, honest sense of the life I was already building toward. So the second an opportunity appeared that moved me faster in that direction, I recognized it instantly. It wasn’t a rescue. It was a shortcut on a path I was already walking.
That’s the difference. You don’t need a map before you’re allowed to move. You need a bearing.
Set the Bearing
You don’t need the whole route figured out. You need to know, in your gut, the general direction of the life you actually want — the one you’d build if fear wasn’t picking your options for you.
Set that bearing, and staying still stops being the automatic answer. Doors you’d have been too scared to walk through start looking like shortcuts instead of threats.
Skip it, and you’ll keep hugging a job you already know isn’t working — waiting for a rescue that was never coming.
The Assignment
You don’t need therapy, a five-year plan, or a vision board to set a bearing. You need ten honest minutes.
Grab a notebook. Write down, in one sentence, the general direction you’re actually headed if fear wasn’t making the call. Not the destination. Not the plan. Just the heading.
Then look at what’s actually in front of you right now — an offer, a conversation, an opportunity you’ve been ignoring. Is it a shortcut toward that heading? Or are you sitting still because it’s genuinely the right call, or because you’ve never bothered to check?
Do it this week, before the next “maybe someday” talks you out of it.
“The woods forgive you for standing still. Your career won’t.”