> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.mattrutherford.co.uk/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# You already know
- URL: https://www.mattrutherford.co.uk/you-already-know/
- Published: 2026-09-18T07:00:12.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-18T07:00:11.000Z
- Description: You know what you are going to do. What stops you is who you think you owe.
- Author: Matt
- Tags: Career

You want to leave. 

You have wanted to leave since roughly February. You have talked it over with your partner, twice with a friend who did the same thing three years ago, once with a former manager over coffee, and last week with somebody you barely know at a wedding.

> Every one of those conversations was useful. Not one of them changed the answer.

The [last two weeks](https://www.mattrutherford.co.uk/still-good-at-it/) were about not being able to see the problem. This is the opposite. You can see it perfectly well. 

What you cannot see is how to pay for it, and **not all of that is money.**

## Who are you obligated to?

I put this question to people more than any other, and it almost never gets a quick answer. There is usually a long pause. Then something arrives that surprises the person saying it.

Hardly anybody says their manager.

A lot of people, eventually, name something that is not a person at all. One of the most common is a CV. You do not want the gap on it. You do not want the sideways step, the smaller title, the year that is awkward to explain to a stranger reading quickly. 

So you stay, and the thing you are protecting is a document.

## Three kinds, and only one of them is solid

Some obligations have a number attached. A mortgage. The school fees. The nineteen months left on something specific. These are real, and they are also the easiest to work with, because a number can be looked at directly. Most people find theirs is smaller and nearer than the dread had suggested. If you have never [named three alternatives to your salary](https://www.mattrutherford.co.uk/a-question-before-a-job-hunt/), that is the place to start.

Some are a story. The CV is the clearest example. So is being the person who has done this for fifteen years. Stories feel binding and are not. 

Nobody is coming to enforce them.

Some you assigned to another person and never told them. What your partner expects. What your parents might have said. These are the heaviest of the three.

> You cannot renegotiate with somebody who has no idea they are holding you.

## Go and check the heaviest one

Take the one at the top of your list.

If you assigned it, check it. Ask the actual person what they actually expect, in words, out loud. That conversation goes differently from how people imagine it, and it goes differently often enough that it is worth the discomfort.

If it is a story, say out loud what you are protecting and who you are protecting it from. The stranger reading your CV in two years has not met you and will never care about that year as much as you do.

If it has a number, get the number.

> You are not still asking because you do not know. You are still asking because of what you think it costs, and a good part of that price was never real.