u/MainTap5031

I'm 46/M. Two years ago I took a state government job that seemed all upside: they offered 30% more than I was then-currently making based on my prior experience in another state. They made it clear that they wanted me based on my expertise in specific areas. I happily accepted and turned down several other offers which, in retrospect, might have been more fulfilling.

Last year my wife and I bought a house. We were able to pay most of it with 14 years of savings and are on track to pay it off in 3 years. My wife really wants to go part-time at work after that.

In the past two years, the staff budget at my work was slashed dramatically due to the state budget crisis, and rather than look at overall productivity (there are many here who are genuinely unproductive), they started putting more duties on the more productive staff. I was asked to take on more and more duties, until now, where I am doing the equivalent work of three jobs, without a promotion or non-incremental pay increase.

There was an open spot for a position staffing the area I have expertise in, which I applied for. Frankly, no one else in the office knows this area well, so they asked me to staff the area the past two years as one of my three roles. Instead, they filled the position with a young staffer with no experience in the area, who will now be my supervisor but will basically rely on me for much of the work. If they had selected me, they would have had to increase my pay to the next category and let me do one job instead of three. By selecting this staffer who earns significantly less than me, I suspect it was purely a cost-saving move. They made a B.S. excuse to me that it was because I did not volunteer for this mentorship program last summer whereas this staffer did.

I have been looking for other jobs but the market is much smaller than a couple of years ago. I have one offer on the table and possibly another that I think I can get, but both would require a 10-15% pay cut from my current salary. Of course, there is no guarantee that the new job will be better, but I've lost all motivation at my current job.

My wife is supportive of me taking a new job at such a pay cut, but it will delay the time when she is able to cut back at her job, which is stressful for her.

Do I suck it up and keep doing this job? This year I became pretty depressed and stopped socializing outside of work because of it. I basically spend all of my free time shut in at home.

Appreciate advice from others who have been down this path. Thanks.

Sorry this is long...this is more about venting than anything.

For background, my wife and I were raised Adventist since youth, but neither of us are devout Adventists and attended more out of a desire to belong to a community. My wife is also a talented pianist and has been sought after at every church we've attended. She played for mostly older congregations in the East coast who were mostly appreciative of her and sometimes paid her. I've mostly helped with A/V or praise team (guitar/bass).

A few years ago, after I accepted a new job, we moved cross-country to the West coast, to an area where we didn't know anyone and it was pretty terrible for the first year. It was a perfect storm of financial struggle living in a high cost-of-living area, living in a high-crime neighborhood, the death of a close family member, and work stress. I got really sick four times that year and became severely depressed, as did my wife. I remember becoming suicidal at one point. If it wasn't for several couples at the Adventist church who invited us to their homes to eat regularly, I think we probably would have either ended up moving back or gotten divorced.

Thankfully, our situation improved as we moved to a safer place in the area and I got a better-paying job. We became more involved with church than ever, mainly out of gratitude for one of the couples who are leaders in the church. I didn't tithe, but I donated offerings in an amount that was more than I spend on my hobbies every month. My wife became the main pianist and I was there almost every Friday and Saturday to help run the church's YouTube stream. I guess she contributed to the quality of the service being seen as improving, because they added a new choir and the demands on my wife grew as people were constantly giving her music pieces to play, often at the last minute.

Last summer my wife got sick and her hair started falling out in clumps. She took a few weeks off work to stay with her parents and went to different doctors, who determined it was stress-related. We decided it was better for her to go part-time at work and cut back on church commitments.

I expected church members to sympathize. Instead, the reaction was largely dismissive, with several women telling my wife that her condition was nothing. In particular, I remember once when my wife told the wife of the church elder (the same couple who we were close with) that she couldn't play that week because she felt overstressed, she came over to our house to chastise her, nearly screaming at her.

We both decided at the end of last year that we would cut back on church involvement significantly. My wife told the leaders that she would only play on special occasions (every few months), and I told them that I was no longer going to be involved in A/V. I don't know if it was out of spite or incompetence, but they still added my name to this year's A/V team but left my name out of the end-of-year recognition list for church volunteers.

This year, people continued to approach my wife almost every week to try to get her to play pieces, or shun her or make negative comments. I finally had enough and decided I would quit going to church altogether. I feel bad because I know that my wife loves to play religious piano music, but not at the direction of toxic people.

It's funny, in the nearly two months since I've quietly stopped going to church, I've only been contacted several times by people who want me to help with A/V, not to hang out or chat. People only contact my wife when they want her to play piano or buy food for potluck.

Now that I've had time to reflect, I feel ashamed to realize the time we gave was only in service of narcissists who perform on stage every week, who see everyone else as side characters. The offerings I give go to programs like sending children of upper-middle class church members on a 'mission trip' to southeast Asia every year, where the church pays to put them up in hotels. Last week when I volunteered time for a food bank for work, that it felt more Christian-like than anything I did for church.

Anyway, I just felt like I needed to put this out there, anonymously.