"The best time to start was the last time you felt this way, and the second-best time is today." Sherman Mohr

For the first time since Gallup started tracking it, more American workers say they're struggling in their lives than say they're thriving. Not "somewhat challenged." Struggling comes in at 49% of the workforce, against 46% who say they're thriving, as of the fourth quarter of 2025. Thriving has been sliding since early 2022, when it stood at 53%. That's not a bad month. That's a four-year trend line, and it just crossed zero.

If you've spent the last year telling yourself the dread you feel on Sunday night is a personal failing, a discipline problem, a gratitude problem, a you problem, the data says otherwise. It is a structural problem and it's measurable. And it is disproportionately landing on people who look a lot like this newsletter's readership. So let's do what Front of the Check always does: skip the vague encouragement, look at the numbers, and then get specific about what the people who successfully get out of it actually do differently.

Starting with engagement, the most-tracked metric in the business. Gallup's global figure for 2025 sits at 20%, the lowest engagement reading since 2020. With 17% of the global workforce actively disengaged, meaning not just checked out but working against the organization. Gallup puts the economic cost of that disengagement at roughly $10 trillion in lost productivity worldwide in a single year. That number is the GDP of a large country, generating nothing and growing because people are miserable at work.

Optimism about escape has collapsed even faster than disengagement. In mid-2022, 70% of U.S. workers believed it was a good time to find a quality job. By the fourth quarter of 2025, that figure had fallen to 28%,  a 42-point drop that Gallup calls the largest collapse in job-market confidence it has recorded in four years of tracking. And yet 51% of workers are actively looking or quietly watching for the exit anyway. They don't believe the market will reward the move. They're looking regardless. The combination of low confidence and high intent is what misery looks like. It becomes resignation at that point. 

There's a newer term for the specific flavor of this: "quiet cracking." A 2025 workplace survey of 1,000 U.S. employees found 54% experiencing some level of it. It is persistent unhappiness and disengagement that stops short of quitting, with 20% describing it as frequent or constant. Dig into the causes and they're almost all fixable. Surveys say 29% call their workload unmanageable, 21% say they don't feel valued or recognized, and 15% don't even understand what's expected of them. This isn't a mystery. It's neglect. 

AARP's most recent survey of workers 50 and older found 24% planning a job change in 2025, up ten full percentage points from 14% the year before, the sharpest jump AARP has recorded. 

A separate AARP study on age bias, fielded in the summer of 2025, found that 64% of workers over 50 have personally experienced or witnessed age discrimination at work, 74% believe age will be a barrier to their next job, and 22% say they currently feel they're being pushed out of their own job. Not laid off. Not retired. Pushed. While still sitting in the chair.

Pull all of it together and the picture is unambiguous: dissatisfaction is high, rising, and hitting people over 50 with an added layer. It has become a well-founded fear that leaving, or being pushed to leave, means fighting bias on the way back in. Misery here isn't hypothetical. It's measured, dated, and getting worse on the trend line.

A 28-year-old who hates their job has time and a labor market that assumes they'll bounce. A 58-year-old who hates their job is carrying compounding interest, a mortgage on a specific timeline, and, per AARP's own numbers, a market that a majority believe is quietly working against them. That combination produces a very particular kind of stuck: too experienced to be ignored, too senior to be replaceable overnight in your own head, and too aware of the calendar to treat a job search as a leisurely project. 

This is also precisely why "just tough it out" and "just quit" are both bad advice, offered by people who haven't looked at the data. Toughing it out against a structural, worsening trend is not resilience. That’s a bet against the numbers above, and the numbers say the trend is getting worse, not better. But quitting without a plan, into a market where only 28% of people think it's a good time to look, is not liberation. That is a free fall with better branding. The people who actually get out of workplace misery and feel okay about it, do something more deliberate than either instinct. Here's what that looks like.

1. Job-craft before you exit-plan. Organizational psychologist Amy Wrzesniewski's research, now decades deep and repeatedly replicated, found that employees who actively reshape their role around their own strengths, relationships, and sense of purpose (without waiting for permission or a title change) report measurably higher engagement, meaning, and career satisfaction than those who wait for the job to change around them. A 2019 longitudinal study in the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology found job crafting produced quasi-experimental gains in work engagement, task performance, and career satisfaction over time. The move: before you assume the job itself is the terminal problem, if this is at all possible, spend thirty days deliberately shifting what you spend time on, who you spend it with, and how you narrate the purpose of the work to yourself. Sometimes this reveals the job is salvageable. More usefully, it sharpens exactly what you're missing, which is the actual preparation for what comes next.

2. Install an internal locus of control. A landmark meta-analysis in the Journal of Organizational Behavior examined decades of research on "locus of control",  whether people believe outcomes are driven by their own actions (internal) or by external forces like bosses, luck, or circumstance (external). They found internal locus of control consistently associated with higher job satisfaction, lower workplace stress and strain, and stronger performance across study after study. This isn't a personality trait you're stuck with; it's a lens you can consciously apply. Every time you catch yourself mentally agonizing over your misery as something is being done to you. Thoughts like "they won't promote me," or "the market is against me",  rewrite the sentence around the one variable you actually control: your next action. This single habit, repeated, is one of the most replicated findings in organizational psychology for a reason.

3. Build psychological capital on purpose. Management researcher Fred Luthans's widely cited "PsyCap" framework identifies four buildable resources — Hope, Efficacy, Resilience, Optimism (HERO) — that correlate with higher job satisfaction, lower burnout, and better performance under pressure. The critical finding across this research stream: these aren't fixed traits some people are born with. They're trainable. Hope, in Luthans' technical sense, means having both a goal and multiple pathways to it,  so if you're miserable, the assignment isn't "feel more optimistic." It's naming two or three concrete pathways out (a lateral move, a fractional pivot, a credential, a consulting test project) so your hope has something to stand on besides wishful thinking.

4. Treat your exit as an asset you're building, not a leap you're taking. This is the move that separates people who drift out of misery from people who engineer their way out. It connects directly to a stubborn myth about age and reinvention. Research by MIT's Pierre Azoulay and coauthors, examining U.S. business founders, found that among the top 0.1% of startups ranked by growth in their first five years, founders started their companies at an average age of 45. This is older than the general founder average of 42, and dramatically older than the college-dropout mythology Silicon Valley sells. Experience isn't a liability the data is quietly correcting for. It's the asset the highest performers were built on. The people who leave misery well don't wake up one Tuesday and quit. They instead spend weeks documenting the evidence of what they've actually built (the numbers, the outcomes, the proof), so the move looks less like a leap and more like the obvious next chapter of a track record already in motion. 

This step is one I have consciously taken. I started Over50Pros and managed its founding, initial pivot into its current version all while remaining employed at another company I founded. My last day at that company is September 30th and I don’t leave it to look for something else, I leave it to fulfill something in which I’m more interested. 

Among the AARP respondents planning a 2025 job change, 40% are pursuing a new job with an employer and 16% are starting their own business, nearly double the 9% who said the same the year before. The exit ramp of choice is shifting toward ownership, not just a new badge.

It's also worth being honest about the money, because the old assumption, that switching jobs automatically means a raise, no longer holds. Wage data through 2025 and into 2026 shows the switch premium has narrowed and, for higher earners specifically, reversed: loyal stayers at the top of the pay scale are now often out-earning people who jump. That's not an argument for staying miserable. It's a correction to a lazy assumption, that escape is primarily a financial trade. For most people leaving genuine misery, the return isn't measured only in the next paycheck. It's measured in the 46% Gallup already told you are thriving instead of struggling, and the fact that people overwhelmingly find their way to the next chapter through relationships rather than job boards: roughly 80% of professional hires trace back to some form of networking, not a cold application into a portal.

Staying in a role that's quietly cracking you doesn't just cost your Sundays. It compounds. The same way the thriving-to-struggling line has compounded, one percentage point at a time, since 2022, until the version of you that finally does look for the exit is more depleted, less confident, and further behind than the version of you reading this sentence right now. The four moves above are not comfortable. They require you to stop narrating your situation as something happening to you and start treating it as a project with inputs you control. That's the whole difference between the people in the 49% who are struggling and the people who quietly, deliberately, engineer their way to the other side of that line.

Pick one of the four moves this week,  not all four. If it's job crafting, block thirty minutes and rewrite one meeting or one deliverable around your actual strengths before Friday. If it's the evidence file, open one document and write down three outcomes you own, with numbers attached. Don't wait for the misery to become unbearable before you start engineering the exit. The data says it's already trending the wrong direction which means the best time to start was the last time you felt this way, and the second-best time is today.

Sources: Gallup, "State of the Global Workplace" (2026 report, 2025 data); Gallup, "U.S. Worker Thriving Declines as Job Market Pessimism Grows"; TalentLMS, "Quiet Cracking: The Hidden Crisis Silently Reshaping Work" (2025 survey); AARP, "New AARP Survey Shows a Sharp Increase in the Number of Older Americans Seeking a Job Change" (Jan. 2025); AARP, "Many Older Workers Say They're Being Pushed Out" (age-bias survey, 2026); Amy Wrzesniewski et al., job crafting research (European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 2019 longitudinal/quasi-experimental study); T.W.H. Ng, K.L. Sorensen & L.T. Eby, "Locus of Control at Work: A Meta-Analysis" (Journal of Organizational Behavior, 2006); Fred Luthans, Psychological Capital (HERO) research; Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin Jones, J. Daniel Kim & Javier Miranda, "Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship" (NBER/HBR, 2018); LinkedIn labor-market networking analysis; CNBC/Fortune 2025–2026 wage-growth reporting on job switchers vs. stayers.

Join us in community? Join the Second Act Advantage Community by visiting us each Monday. No agenda, some structure, some accountability. We’ll start October 5th at 12:30 Eastern with a simple three question guideline.

1) What do you have planned this week?

2) What are your hurdles?

3) What did you accomplish over the last week?  

Here is the link: Second Act Community Call
Monday, October 5 · 12:30 – 1:00pm
Time zone: America/New_York
Google Meet joining info
Video call link: https://meet.google.com/xpk-xbxe-pyy 

If you need assistance or want to discuss anything above, schedule a call.

Thanks to our sponsor. Nokbox: A system designed to keep life organized, even when things get chaotic. NOK stands for Next of Kin, and NOKBOX help you organize important documents, accounts, possessions, and estate details so your next of kin knows exactly what to do in something happens.

But it’s not just for the future. NOKBOX gives you peace of mind now by keeping everything in one organized place, saving time, reducing stress, and making it easy to find what you need when you need it.

Check them out below and invest in a NOKBOX for you and your family.

These links will provide ways to implement what was shared in the featured article.

You don't need a coach to begin any of the four moves above. You need the right free tool and thirty minutes.

Laurie Petersen, 58 — PR/marketing exec turned freelance consultant. Took a full-time job at a small PR firm at 58 and lasted seven weeks: her direct style clashed with clients who wanted answers, not brainstorms, and she found herself chained to outdated tools and other people's priorities. She quit and returned to project-based freelance work on her own terms. Her own line on it: "I had promised myself never to become chained to a desk again and to only work where I could set my own priorities and working hours." Six weeks later she'd already replaced the income and was building a women's development retreat on the side. Next Avenue

Paul Tasner, 64 — fired operations exec turned sustainable-packaging founder. Senior director of operations at a San Francisco manufacturer, fired at 64. Instead of chasing another corporate role, he spent two years building PulpWorks, a biodegradable-packaging company, launching it at 66. "It's very meaningful to me," he says of a business built around cutting single-use plastic. Forbes/Next Avenue

Chris Donovan, 59 — telephone repairman turned shoe designer. Twenty-five years in a job he describes as a dead end. A prostate cancer diagnosis at 50 forced the reckoning most people avoid until it's forced on them: he enrolled at Polimoda fashion school in Florence and is now president of his own footwear label, Chris Donovan Footwear. Forbes/Next Avenue

Jane Canapini, 59 — laid-off creative director turned travel entrepreneur. Twenty years as a creative director at ad agencies, laid off at 51 — the exact scenario this week's feature is built around. She founded Grownup Travels, a blog and business for active travelers over 45, and coined her own term for the leap: "reluctant-preneur." Forbes/Next Avenue

Cathy Heying, 49 — burned-out social worker turned auto mechanic and nonprofit founder. After years in social work at a Minneapolis church, she enrolled in technical college in her late 40s, nearly quit, and pushed through on an instructor's encouragement. She now runs The Lift Garage, a low-cost auto repair shop for people who can't afford dealer prices — purpose relocated, not abandoned. Forbes/Next Avenue

You’re doing $15 tasks with $150 talent. Need help with spreadsheets, social media posting, article creation and posting, LinkedIn connecting, etc? We have help available for incredibly low hourly rates. 40 hours a month currently available for $8.00 hourly.

You Need Community

A free seven day challenge program that gets you reconnected with your network. Less than 10 minutes a day. Click Here

Misery

I’ve had times when I’ve been miserable at work. It’s not fun. The biggest reframe I’ve used was shared to be by my business coach Angus Nelson. He reminded me to remember to say, “I get to do this.” That simple phrasing took me off of my high horse long enough to re-enter a state of gratitude. The gratitude lifted me and I was able to retain focus and perform well enough to manage an exit on my own terms. The locus of control had become internal. It really does work.

Visit the new Sherman Mohr website. I would love your feedback. https://shermanmohr.com

And as always, if you need help with anything related to topics in the newsletter or transition over 50 years old, schedule a call.

Please click below and tell me what you like or dislike about the Front of the Check newsletter and how I may deliver more value to you! You are my growing community and I want your feedback. I’ll Venmo or Zelle you $5 for two minutes of feedback.

Click Here for Feedback Form

Coming Next Week: Starting Over After Financial Reversal