The option you cannot price
17th September 2026 · Career
Over the past few months I have had a version of the same conversation with several clients, in several countries. The details differ. The arithmetic underneath them does not.
Someone is holding two options. The first is the path they are already on, and they can tell you what it pays, what the title looks like in five years, and roughly what that is worth when they get there. They do not enjoy it much, and have not for a while.
The second option is made out of the parts of the work they like, arranged differently, on terms that are not the traditional ones. When I ask them to describe it, they reach for adjectives.
It is more authentically me, with flex for my family, and incorporating more elements I am feeling passionate about.
Read that again. Nothing in it is woolly. Every part names something a person could reasonably organise a life around. What it does not contain anywhere is a figure.
None of them is avoiding the question. These are careful people who have thought about this more than most people think about anything, and they have not moved.
What is happening is not indecision.
The comparison was never fair
One option has a number attached to it. The other does not. Set them beside each other and the one you can score wins, and the win arrives looking like a decision you made.
The mechanism is worth being precise about, because it is not a failure of nerve. A number is portable. You can carry it into a conversation with your partner, defend it to a parent, put it in a spreadsheet, hold it against last year. The unpriced option cannot travel like that. It arrives at every conversation needing to be explained from the beginning, and by the fourth explanation it sounds thinner than it did in your head.
So it stops being raised. Not rejected, only left out of the arithmetic. The option without a unit loses a contest it was never entered in.
You will have heard this called golden handcuffs, or one more year. Both names describe the same failed sum.
This year it is worse
In 2026 the priced option picked up a second advantage. It became the safe one.
The clearest data is American, and worth reading with that in mind. A ResumeBuilder survey in February found 57 per cent of workers describing themselves as job huggers, up from 45 per cent six months earlier, with the US quit rate at its lowest sustained level in roughly a decade. MetLife's 2026 study found 56 per cent of employees staying out of necessity, and only 18 per cent staying because they actually want to. DHR Global recorded engagement falling from 88 to 64 per cent inside a year while retention held steady.
The European picture shows the same gap from the other side. LinkedIn research published in January, carried out by Censuswide across seven European countries with 10,400 respondents, found 47 per cent planning to look for a new job in 2026 and 77 per cent saying they felt unprepared to find one. In Germany, France and the UK the unprepared share sat close to four in five. Two thirds of recruiters in the same research said it had become harder to find qualified people over the past year, which is worth holding beside the first number.
Read those together and you get a workforce that has stopped moving without having stopped wanting to. Retention that looks like loyalty is doing something else.
What that does to your decision is specific. Fear has now been placed on the same side of the scale as the number, and it argues in the same direction. The staying is easy to justify out loud. The leaving is not.
Plenty of people will describe this year as the one in which they decided to stay put. Most of them will not have decided anything.
Where it lands if you are living away from home
Your terms are being localised. ECA International, who benchmark mobility policy for corporate HR teams, describe localisation as converting someone from assignment terms onto local ones, with the ties back to the home country removed or heavily reduced. They distinguish it from a permanent transfer, which is one-way from the outset. Industry commentary has long observed that companies know which populations will accept this, and that senior people in their late forties and early fifties feature heavily, on the reasoning that they were the ones the large package attracted in the first place. Whatever weight you give that last point, the structural fact stands. The support you are losing is not coming back, and nothing obliges your employer to help you go home afterwards.
There is a clock the spreadsheet does not show. Take Singapore. The Employment Pass qualifying salary is banded by age, benchmarked by the Ministry of Manpower to the top third of local PMET salaries, and the band that matters to most people reading this is the highest one. At 45 and above, the current minimum fixed monthly salary is S$10,700 outside financial services and S$11,800 within it. For new applications from 1 January 2027, and for renewals of passes expiring from 1 January 2028, those become S$11,500 and S$12,700.
Now read that against a package being cut. A reduction that takes your fixed monthly salary below the band for your age does not only make you poorer. It can make you ineligible for the pass that lets you live there, and failing that threshold ends the application whatever else is in your favour.
The same logic turns up elsewhere wearing different clothes. Singapore has no dedicated retirement visa route, so staying on after the job ends generally means qualifying through something else. In the UAE, people who have lived there their whole lives still leave when they retire.
Your right to be where you are is attached to the job you are currently deciding whether to keep. Most package calculations never surface that.
The exit date. You have a number for what one more year earns. You have nothing for what one more year costs. So the year gets taken, and then another one.
The move home. Flights, tax, salary differential, school fees, all countable. Time in the same room as your mother, not countable. The uncountable side is the one people tell me keeps them awake, and it is the side that never makes it into the spreadsheet they built.
A note on what this is. I am a coach. I am not an immigration adviser, a tax adviser or a financial planner, and nothing here is a substitute for any of them. The visa and money questions above need a professional who works in that field. What I can help with is the decision those numbers are supposed to serve, which is a different job and usually the one going unattended.
The part nobody wants in the model
If you are over fifty, there is a reason to do this now rather than next year, and it is not a motivational one.
AARP's January 2026 survey of workers over fifty found nearly two thirds had seen or experienced age discrimination, and around a fifth felt they were being pushed out of their own jobs. Over-fifties also spend roughly twice as long unemployed as younger peers, and OECD work finds hiring discrimination intensifying at later career stages.
The waiting strategy assumes both options are still on the table on the day you feel ready. For this cohort the assumption is weak on one side. A decision deferred long enough gets made by somebody else, and the version they pick is rarely the one you would have chosen.
None of which is an argument for jumping. It is an argument for having priced the second option before you need it.
Giving the second option a unit
The work is not to stop counting. You will count. What you can do is put something countable on both sides, so the comparison is at least being run honestly.
Four moves, in this order.
Take the number apart. A salary is not one thing. Write down what it actually buys, line by line, and what each line is for. Two things tend to surface. Some of the money is doing work you no longer need it to do, because the school fees end in two years or the mortgage is nearly clear. And some of it is buying standing inside a system you have already decided to leave, which is a real purchase and worth seeing plainly.
Pick a crude unit for the other side. It does not have to be good. It has to exist. Unbroken evenings in a week. Days a year in the same room as your parents. The number of decisions in a month you would defend to someone who disagreed with you. Whether you can name one conversation this week you looked forward to. A rough count beats an adjective, because a count can be tracked, and tracking is what lets you argue with yourself in three months.
Price the first option in that same unit. This is the step people skip. You now have a measure. Run the current path against it. What usually turns up is that the score has been falling for about two years and was recorded nowhere.
Put a date on it. An unpriced option also loses on timing, because nothing forces it into the room. Choose a day in the calendar by which you will have decided, set in advance, with nothing riding on it except that you said so. Note what you are dating. It is a decision date, which is not the same as a leaving date, and the decision may well be to stay on terms you have actually examined. The date is there to stop the question running indefinitely on the assumption that it will feel clearer later.
One more thing about what you are measuring. The same person described the effect of getting more of the work they cared about like this: it makes it a bit easier to accept the mundane tasks you cannot avoid. The dull parts of the job do not go anywhere. What changes is how much they take out of you, which is countable in a rough way and has never once appeared on a payslip.
What actually happens
Two outcomes I did not expect when I started working this way.
The first is that sometimes the whole result is a reclassification. Nothing gets decided, no date gets set, and the second path moves out of the category of daydream and into the category of option. People are noticeably different afterwards, even though on paper nothing has changed.
The second is that the exercise often fails to produce two numbers. It produces several. Once the second path carries any unit at all, people start noticing that it does not have to be taken whole. Part of the current work kept and the rest replaced. Fractional arrangements. A portfolio of smaller pieces that adds up differently. What arrived as one path against another turns into four or five possible shapes, each with its own figures.
That is messier than the comparison you set out to run. It is also the point at which most people stop describing themselves as stuck.
What this does not do
It will not tell you which path to take. None of these conversations has ended with me solving it, and I am not going to suggest otherwise. Two clean numbers still leave you sitting with a choice that money was never going to settle.
What it does is put the second option in the room where you can look at it. Months of circling a decision are usually months of a comparison being run in the dark, and the dark is doing the deciding.
If you want to know which of your two options you have been treating as the serious one, write them both down tonight and see which has a figure beside it.
Silke Prodinger-Leong coaches senior leaders through career and life transitions, in English, German and French. If this is the question you are carrying, the career coaching page sets out how that work runs, or you can book a chemistry session. Thirty minutes, free, no pitch. You can also just reply to this by email.
