“For three years I struggled to find work within conservation or ecology – working a few short contracts, volunteering a lot and waitressing to keep myself afloat. These were the most exhausting years of my life; constantly job-seeking, working sometimes seven days a week and feeling like a failure.” These words, from 24-year-old Emma, could be the experience of just about any 20- or 30-something woman pursuing their 'dream' career in today’s world. Pressure comes from all directions – our parents, ourselves, Juno-filtered Instagram posts – to find a job that’s somehow 'meaningful', and make whatever sacrifices necessary to secure it. The idea is that, deep down, we all have a passion – something that‘s ‘meant’ for us – and all we need to do to achieve happiness is to realise that passion. A nice idea, if it were that easy. After several years balancing volunteering or work experience with shift work in the hope that a vacancy would open up in the right area, Emma eventually shifted focus and ended up with a role as a designer at a small magazine publisher instead. “I often feel ashamed that I'm not still trying to work within conservation and that I've somehow given up on ‘my dream job’,” she says, “but in reality I had no idea where I wanted to end up before.” The feeling of having failed ourselves career-wise is a familiar one, especially among women. Recent figures from the Health and Safety Executive show that women in the UK suffer more from work-related stress , anxiety and depression than men. A lead psychiatrist commenting on these numbers blamed, unsurprisingly, factors like unequal pay, being expected to “look the part” and the feeling that we must prove we’re as good as men. Inequality in the workplace is – for the most part – out of our control. For a long time, just accessing the world of work meant navigating one obstacle after another; legally, women in the UK weren't allowed to join 'the professions' until 1919, and the Equal Pay Act only came about in 1970. Then there's the instability of the job market . So why do we measure ourselves by the success of our careers as if these barriers (and others) don't exist? Philosopher Alain de Botton defines ‘status anxiety’ as “a worry… that we are in danger of failing to conform to the ideals of success laid down by our society and that we may as a result be stripped of dignity and respect; a worry that we are currently occupying too modest a rung or are about to fall to a lower one.” Hits home, right? Not only do we worry we’ll fail but, in a world in which the word ‘success’ is practically interchangeable with ‘career’, we worry that failing to become successful means we’ll lose our right to be respected. And that gives way to a lot of negative, unhelpful thoughts; that we’re undeserving, a waste of space. Our biggest insecurities, on steroids. It doesn’t help that the baby boomer generation, including our parents, is dishing out some pretty outdated life advice. Articles entitled ‘Advice that older people would give their younger selves’ are all over the internet and always contain the phrases 'do what you love' and 'money isn’t everything'.