Are you a woman dreaming of a career change? Here's my advice
Having run out of cooking shows to look at with my post-work crisps, I have taken to just watching what's on TV, which is mostly A New Life in the Sun: Where Are They Now? and Château DIY. Both feature British people who have made radical changes, living out their dreams with wildly varying degrees of competence and success, mostly running restaurants, wedding venues, gites or creative retreats in idyllic locations.
There is a reason these shows air in the early evening, as we close our laptops with a defeated clunk or get home after another awful commute: they are selling the notion that another life is possible. Only the very fortunate, or pathologically positive, wash up on the sofa at 6.30pm daily with the clear-eyed, full-hearted certainty that they have spent the day doing precisely what they were put on earth to do with their wild, precious lives.
I was thinking about this as I read about Good Housekeeping's recent survey, in which two-thirds of women said they would change career: 31% 'dream about the possibility' and 34% 'are open to pivoting'. This seems low – did they conduct this survey on payday, or are GH readers a particularly glass-half-full breed? Don't we all feel this? Gallup's 2025 State of the Global Workplace report showed a decline in employee engagement and wellbeing, with 79% (87% in Europe) either not engaged or 'actively disengaged' and only 33% of employees rating themselves as 'thriving'. We are, globally, not super into our jobs.
I don't want a new life in the sun – I fear the fiery orb almost as much as I fear changing duvet covers, which seems to constitute an unacceptably large part of most televised new starts I've seen – but I do occasionally imagine a different life (somewhere with reliably heavy cloud cover) and job. Not that mine is bad. A friend once read about working conditions in Nigerian sawmills and it became our shorthand for work infinitely worse than ours. Sitting in a supportive chair, a cup of tea by my elbow, typing, with frequent breaks to play with the hens or stare into the fridge is as far from the Nigerian sawmill as you can get. I have nothing to complain about and I'm not complaining. I just often feel incompetent and anxious and – if you can believe it – slightly pointless.
Like everyone (right?), I have parallel-life jobs that a little late-night voice in my head whispers I would perhaps have enjoyed more, or been better at: archaeologist or translator; art historian or wildlife rehabber. Then there are the fantastical ones, that I'm temperamentally unsuited to and have no talent for but wish it were otherwise: opera singer, professional aesthete, Zadie Smith, the pope. Unlike 45% of the Good Housekeeping survey respondents, I don't need a better work/life balance but, like 43% of them, I often think I could be doing something more meaningful, and might enjoy a new challenge (40%), say, issuing style diktats or papal encyclicals.
But, but, but. As anyone who has tried to get a job recently will tell us wistful wonderers, the grass may be greener, but good luck getting to it. The employment market is horrible, with UK unemployment at its highest in four years. Opportunities and rates are being hollowed out by artificial intelligence, especially in creative industries – and that applies equally, if not more, to freelancers. Then there are the increasingly dehumanising and absurd hiring protocols – AI 'applicant tracking systems' screening CVs, interminable selection processes imposed by employers emboldened by a buyer's market, chatbot interviews – potentially baking in bias and discrimination.
I suspect we mostly know that, just as we know that even dream jobs are just jobs some days. Answering a Good Housekeeping survey or watching New Lives in the Sun offer a safe space to dream a little. I've started treating the show as a gentle nightly public service: a reminder that dumping the nine-to-five to live your dream could involve ant infestations, floods, labyrinthine local regulations, loneliness or dry rot. Could things be better? Possibly. Could they be worse? Absolutely. Would they most likely be sort of the same, but different? Yeah, probably.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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