Should I put a toxic job over my happiness?
Hey everyone! I want to try and keep this as short and sweet as possible but I will have to get into some detail to try and show you what has gotten me into this headspace.
So I started at my current job in 2023. My father started dating a woman, and her brother desperately needed someone to come work in the warehouse at his company he owns. I was desperate for a job at the time so I applied and pretty much started immediately. The pay was not great but it was just enough for me to pay for my car payment and insurance. I definitely noticed there were glaring problems with this job but I put it off because at the time I just truly needed the money. Now, I want to preface all this to say I got a very well paying job in 2022 and quit after about 6 months due to the mental stress. I’ll admit that at that time I made a series of bad moves, because soon after I got the job in 2022 I bought a brand new car with a payment of $600 a month. Even then I knew quitting a job with nothing else lined up and bills to pay is just idiotic, but I did it anyways. After I quit I had money saved up to keep paying my car at least, but not for too long. After being unemployed for nearly a year and applying to jobs every day, I finally got my current job and my financial stress was relieved at least. I guess when you get a job after being unemployed for so long you just ignore the flaws for a while. I truly didn’t mind this job for about 6 months until a certain employee started here. We will call him Jack. When I started it was me and one other guy (who’s not relevant to any of this) in the warehouse. One day he called in sick after missing a day the week before and they just fired him that day over text. It seemed pretty harsh to me but jump to current day and since 2023 I have seen 13(!) people be fired, not even counting the ones who quit on their own. For reference, my job is usually between 10-15 employees at any given time. It was just me as the only warehouse employee for a month until Jack started. Jack and I actually got along and became pretty good friends quickly and for a few months we worked together perfectly. Then the owners told me one day I would be taking over the truck route on the east coast. I was completely shell shocked that I had no choice in it and I would now be away from home four days a week and I’m a complete homebody. Either way I just embraced doing something new and pushed through for 9 months and never complained or missed a single day. Then the manager who was over me was fired for seemingly no reason. Turns out the owners wanted to bring back a former manager who had worked there before me and made her general manager. Call her Carly. Not even a week later I was taken off the route and placed back in the warehouse. It was fine with me because I was glad to not be staying in hotels most of the time. I was back in the warehouse with Jack and I will just say this first, Jack may be the horniest guy I’ve ever met in my life. When I got back in the warehouse he told me about before he started there he already knew Carly and apparently asked her to have sex with him even though he knew she was married, and from what he told me she didn’t absolutely shut it down which should say enough about her character. I noticed over time Jack and Carly were starting to get closer and seeming flirty until Jack just told me one day they were sleeping together. Sure enough as the weeks went by, Jack started getting more and more special treatment. It also helped that he is a total ass kisser to the owners and that is just honestly something I have never been able to do. He would no longer have to take local deliveries (the worst part of the job) and was getting paid more than me just because he complained enough to Carly. So here I was doing all the work nobody wanted to do and now Jack had a desk in the air conditioned office and was never even in the warehouse to help me anymore. He was always too busy flirting with Carly and kissing up to the owners, which they just absolutely eat up of course. Things were obviously going downhill at this point and around that time I had just adopted a puppy who I need to be there for every day. Of course not long after, they fire the person who took the coast route after me and were asking me to do it again. I explained to the owners that I could not do it due to having a dog now and the text I received back word for word was, “give it back or kill it with a shovel lol” So guess what I did? Never responded and didn’t go back to work. Once again had nothing lined up and had bills to pay. I regretted it only because of the pay I was missing but I definitely didn’t feel bad about it. A month of unemployment and trying to make ends meet goes by and the owners are calling me every week asking me to come back and honestly financial stress is just too much so I went back to the job. 7 months later I’m still here, alone in the warehouse doing the shitty work and still watching every new hire get fired within a few months. Everybody’s attitude has become completely toxic and everyone who has been here for a while has just completely worn on each other. I never want to wake up, I can’t hardly fall asleep, I have a deep dependence on nicotine now, I’m eating like crap etc… This job through the ups and downs has stripped me to my very core and made me nothing but a wage slave. Obviously I’ve learned my lesson about up and quitting with nowhere else to go and with a year left to pay off my car, I’m just very discouraged right now. The obvious answer is push through for a year while still steadily applying to jobs (Which I’ve never stopped) at least until my main bill is gone. A year of being unhappy can feel a lot longer than a year though, so tell me, what would you do? I’ll be reading and replying to all your comments because I really just need some outside opinions on this. Thanks for letting me vent Reddit!