Shocking reason Australian woman quit her ‘dream job’

Bethany thought she had finally found her ideal job in Australia, however she soon discovered that all was not as it seemed.

When Bethany Dive returned to Australia in 2022 after living and working abroad, and began working full time at a Sydney marketing agency, she thought she’d found her dream job.

“I was really excited to have a stable, full-time job,” she tells news.com.au.

“My job at the agency was specialised in a niche that I was really experienced in, and for the first time in my life I thought ‘wow, I’m really good at this’. I felt so confident in my role. I really loved my clients. I really was getting along with my team. I was just on cloud nine.”

But by mid-2023, the cracks began to show.

“At first, because I loved the work so much and was so committed to doing a good job, I didn’t recognise the red flags. I know agency life is fast-paced, but I’d hear people talking about staying logged on until 10.30pm responding to emails, or working on a Sunday because the workload was so intense,” explains the 27-year-old.

Soon, however, a combination of poor leadership, fast growth and high employee turnover meant work began taking over every corner of Bethany’s life.

“We lost almost 80 per cent of the staff within a period of a few months, which meant work just kept piling up,” she recalls.

Bethany was excited to have a stable, full-time job. Picture: Supplied

She kept pushing and pushing in her role. Picture: Supplied

“There was no such thing as ‘inbox zero’. There was no ‘finishing’. You’d just get to a point where you were so exhausted you’d have to log off, then you’d log back on the next day and start all over again. There was not a lot of support from management or really any solutions offered as to how to manage the workload of five extra people.”

Still, though, Bethany was committed to doing a good job.

“Because I was so passionate about the work, I kept going at 100 miles per hour, I kept just pushing and pushing, but there was no support from above, so even the ideas I had were not able to be implemented, because we simply didn’t have the capacity.”

By the end of 2023, Bethany says she had “that sinking Sunday-night feeling” every night of the week.

Australia is in the grips of a mental health crisis, and people are struggling to know who to turn to, especially our younger generations. Can We Talk? is a News Corp awareness campaign, in partnership with Medibank, equipping Aussies with the skills needed to have the most important conversation of their life.

“There was a pit of dread in my stomach every time I thought about work,” she says. “I think it’s a good measure of an organisation’s work culture, that Sunday-night feeling. If your employees are dreading coming into work on a regular basis, there is a good chance you’re not providing a healthy work culture.”

By December, Bethany knew she couldn’t continue. “The interesting thing is, I still didn’t recognise what I was going through as burnout,” she says, “I just knew I was struggling to get out of bed each morning. Worrying about work took over everything, and I had stopped doing all of the things I loved to do, and had no energy for anything else.”

Bethany handed in her resignation before Christmas, unable to endure the “pressure cooker situation” any longer.

While she thought she had found her dream job, there was an unexpected side. Picture: Supplied

She’s not alone. Alarming data from Mental Health First Aid International 40 per cent of employee resignations in Australia can be attributed to burnout, with 61 per cent of Aussie workers experiencing the symptoms of burnout, well above the global average of 48 per cent.

The data also showed burnout and stress-related absenteeism cost the Australian economy an estimated $14 billion annually – and yet things aren’t improving.

In general, Australians are struggling in record numbers with mental health challenges, with health insurer Medibank revealing it spent $2 billion last year alone – the highest amount on record – for mental-health related hospital admissions.

Mental Health Australia policy and advocacy director Emma Greeney said the nation was seeing some “staggering rates” of mental distress.

She said intervening early was “so important” but cost was impacting whether people got the support they needed.

For Bethany, who assumed quitting her job was the panacea she needed to improve her emotional state, the reality was something very different.

“I was excited to leave the stress behind me, but I think my body got the message that it could finally relax and really it was once I’d left the role that the worst symptoms began,” she says.

“I was never officially diagnosed with depression, but I had all the symptoms. By February, I could barely get out of bed. I had zero motivation to leave the house, and while I was supposed to be applying for new jobs, the idea of actually having another full time role filled me with dread. I really couldn’t do anything. I was crying a lot, to be honest, like it was really, really, really hard, because I had just gone from finally getting to this really senior level in my career, to suddenly feeling as thought I’d taken 10 steps backwards. I was questioning my career choice, because all I knew was that I definitely could not do that again. I didn’t have it in me to go through that kind of experience again.”

Bethany was excited to leave the stress behind her. Picture: Supplied

It was the support of family and friends, along with her partner, that Bethany credits with getting her through this low period.

“My partner eventually said to me: ‘you love freelancing! You loved the freedom of project-based work, why don’t you focus on doing more of that?’ and so that’s what I did, slowly,” she recalls.

As Bethany was able to take on more clients on her own terms – structuring her work day in a way that left room for the things that helped with her mental health, she noticed herself starting to slowly improve.

“It’s amazing that you don’t realise how bad things got until you find yourself on the other side of it,” she says.

“I’ve found myself being able to get outside in nature and go for more walks, to be able to head to the beach and get a coffee and work from a cafe near the ocean, and best of all, I’ve started reading again! Reading is something I love, and I realised I’d completely stopped doing it.

“All of the things that in the peak of my burnout I convinced myself I didn’t have the energy for, were actually the things that would have given me more energy and better mental health.”

Spurred on by the success of her freelance projects, Bethany set up her own marketing agency, Dive Media, based around the hard-won principles she’s developed around ‘burnout-proofing’ her career.

“I can choose clients who align with our values and if they don’t, I’m not in a rush to take them on. I give myself and the team time to care. I am committed to slow growth, so that I don’t end up expanding too quickly without the supports in place that I need,” she explains. “And I’ve set up as a remote agency, because I truly believe it’s the way forward and that Australia is a bit archaic in this insistence on everyone being back in the office all of a sudden. I want to be life-centric, not work-centric.”

Bek Day is a freelancer writer

Originally published as Shocking reason Australian woman quit her ‘dream job’