There’s a moment most of us have experienced at work when frustration and negativity start becoming a habit.
You’re annoyed. You’re tired. You’re angry. You’re unsure. You’re maybe even a little scared. You don’t know whether the problem is the job, the team, the leader, the culture, or the way you’re simply reacting to all of it. (It’s rarely the last one.)
So you do the most human thing possible. You complain.
That’s usually when I annoy everyone and say:
You either change the environment you exist in or change how you exist in the environment.
You either need to find a new place to work, which is sometimes a challenge because it’s not entirely in your control, or you need to change how you work where you are. That is your choice.
Changing how you exist is changing how you show up, how you see yourself, how you operate, how you think, which is entirely in your control.
Change the room. Or change your relationship to the room. But don’t just keep standing in the same room, with the same perspective, and the same problems, and the same attitude, because at some point, the problem is no longer the environment; it’s your ongoing allowance and agreement to be shaped by it, especially when you already feel it crushing you. The problem becomes you.
This does not mean quit any job that challenges you. It does not mean giving up is the answer. It does not mean toxic positivity fixes poor workplaces. It does not mean people should smile their way through dysfunction, ambiguity, burnout, disrespect, or bad incentives.
Some environments are legitimately unhealthy. Some leaders create chaos and call it process. Some cultures reward exhaustion and punish honesty. Some organizations quietly train people to stop thinking, stop caring, stop challenging, stop creating, and then act confused when everyone starts drifting through the day like ambivalent ghosts.
So no, this is not a sermon about having a better attitude while the system keeps taking pieces out of you. It is a sermon about ownership – of yourself, your point of view, and your career, because it’s your career, not your boss’, coworkers’, or company’s, so it’s up to you to consider where you stand. It’s up to you to stand up for yourself, even to yourself.
You either change the environment you exist in or change how you exist in the environment.
It’s all you; your choice. That choice may be to leave. That choice may be to stay and change. That choice may be to redraw a boundary, ask a better question, have a harder conversation, rebuild a healthier rhythm, make better goals, define a new path for yourself, or reclaim the part of yourself you’ve slowly given away to the system.
But the choice matters, because when people forget they have agency and ownership, work doesn’t just become frustrating. It becomes formative. It starts shaping your tone, your energy, your expectations, your courage, your generosity, and eventually your identity. And that’s when culture stops being something around us and starts becoming something inside us.
The Psychology of Fitting In
People don’t usually wake up one morning and decide to become cynical, guarded, passive, defensive, or negative. They learn it. They adapt into it. They respond to the environment around them. They give up control.
We’re adaptive creatures by nature, so without reminding ourselves to take back control, we often adapt and are conditioned into a workplace rut.
If decisions are constantly ignored or questioned, we learn not to make decisions, and we feel the loss of authority.
If ideas are repeatedly criticized, we learn to edit and restrain ourselves, and creative, human, innovative, imaginative thinking slowly dies.
If urgency is always high and recovery is always low, we learn to operate on adrenaline until we’re bled dry. We sprint, sprint, sprint despite work being a marathon, so we collapse and die.
If effort is rewarded with silence, people learn that excellence isn’t always worth the extra emotional cost.
That’s human behavior reacting to oppressive environments. Keywords: reacting, being a victim of, subject to, not in control of.
When we start a job and dig in, we’re always reading the room, always scanning for what’s safe, what’s rewarded, what’s risky, what earns belonging, what threatens status, what gets ignored, and what gets punished. We seek to perform, to solve, to overcome, to achieve, to win. And then, we face conflict, obstacles, change, uncertainty, and we adapt to feel more comfortable and to fit in. We become fluent in the environment. We learn how to move through it. We learn how to protect ourselves inside it. We learn how to joke about it, work around it, complain about it, excuse it, survive it, and eventually mistake our survival strategy for our personality, for our identity.
The Psychology of Agency
There’s a classic idea in psychology called learned helplessness.
In 1967, Martin Seligman and Steven Maier published research showing that animals exposed to uncontrollable negative events later struggled to escape even when escape became possible. The original interpretation was that they had learned their actions didn’t matter, and that belief interfered with future action.
Years later, Maier and Seligman revisited the theory with more neuroscience behind it. Their updated view was even more interesting: passivity under prolonged adversity may be less something we learn and more a default response when control doesn’t feel available. What has to be learned, or relearned, is control.
Why this matters to us is that a lot of what we call disengagement in an employee or coworker – or yourself! – may actually be people who’ve stopped believing their effort changes anything.
They tried to improve the process and nothing happened. They raised the concern and got labeled difficult. They asked for clarity and received more ambiguity. They took ownership and then watched the decision get pulled back.
At first, people are frustrated. Then they’re tired. Then they’re careful. Then they’re quiet. Then they’re gone, sometimes for months or even years before they actually resign.
That’s not always an attitude problem. Sometimes it’s an agency problem. And if we want better workplaces, better leadership, better creative cultures, and better human performance, we have to understand this clearly: people come alive when they believe their actions can affect reality.
They fade when they believe nothing they do changes the outcome.
Some Study About a Plant
A simple but meaningful study that should be considered for all leadership and company culture discussions came from Ellen Langer and Judith Rodin in the 1970s.
They ran a field experiment in a nursing home where one group of residents was given more choice and personal responsibility than all the others. They were encouraged to make decisions about their daily lives, not just follow schedules, orders, and directions, including small things like choosing their daily activities and caring for a plant. It was just a subtle shift in ownership, but the residents who were given more responsibility became more active and engaged. It enlivened them!
When people are treated as participants in their own lives, something wakes up inside them, but when people are treated as passengers, something goes quiet.
Whether in a nursing home or a marketing agency, people need to experience themselves as active agents, not passive recipients of whatever the environment gives them. They need to feel that their choices matter. Their effort matters. Their standards matter. Their voice matters. Their presence changes the room.
And that’s the thread running through all of this.
You either change the environment you exist in or change how you exist in the environment.
It’s a chiastic reminder that you’re still a participant. You still have agency. You’re still an active participant in your life. So, you gotta do something about it. Go grab a plant or something!
It’s OK to Complain
I want to be careful with the word complain, because complaining is not always a character flaw. Sometimes a complaint is the first direct, honest message that something is broken.
People complain when they care about something enough to be disappointed by it and want to help fix it. They complain when the gap between what’s promised and what’s practiced becomes too large to ignore. They complain when they still have some belief that the thing could be better, or at least that it should’ve been.
That’s why leaders shouldn’t dismiss complaints too quickly. Inside many complaints is a person trying, perhaps clumsily, to protect a standard, and to actively change the environment they exist in.
But if complaints never become a conversation, a boundary, a decision, a request, a repair, a contribution, or a change in behavior, it starts becoming something else. A ritual. A routine.
The meeting after the meeting. The side conversation after the call. The raised eyebrow across the table. The private Slack. The subtle pleasure of shared frustration. The relief of finding someone else who sees the same thing, feels the same thing, resents the same thing.
There’s humanity in that, but there’s also risk because groups can bond around what they’re against without ever building what they’re for. They can confuse shared frustration with shared purpose. They can become emotionally close through resentment while becoming practically further away from change.
And then the complaint circle starts to feel like control. It feels like action because people are talking. It feels like courage because people are being honest. It feels like clarity because people agree. But, then nothing changes, and nothing is positive, so complaint becomes culture.
So you must change something – in you or around you.
Sometimes You Need to Change the Environment You Exist in
There are times when the healthiest decision is to leave. Sometimes the environment is simply wrong for you.
Maybe things changed; maybe you changed. But leaving can be an act of ownership. It can be mature. It can be honest. It can be generous, even, because sometimes staying resentfully helps no one.
But leaving is most powerful when it comes with understanding, because if you leave one environment without examining how you existed in it, you may carry the same patterns into the next one.
A new job can give you new conditions. It can’t automatically give you a new relationship with conflict, feedback, ambiguity, authority, disappointment, or responsibility.
That part travels with you. You started letting it become your identity.
So yes, change the environment when the environment needs to change, but don’t miss the deeper opportunity to understand what the environment revealed.
Sometimes You Need to Change How You Exist in the Environment
There are also times when the environment doesn’t need to be abandoned. It needs to be engaged differently. YOU need to engage differently.
This is where the psychology of job crafting becomes useful. Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton described employees as active crafters of their work, people who can reshape the task, relational, and cognitive boundaries of their jobs in ways that change the meaning of the work and their identity within it.
Active crafters. Not passive occupants. Not helpless recipients. Not people waiting for the perfect environment to appear before they bring their best selves to it.
Crafters. Hands-on, hands dirty, making change.
We can craft how we prepare. We can craft how we communicate. We can craft which relationships we invest in. We can craft how directly we ask for clarity. We can craft whether we bring curiosity or suspicion into the room. We can craft whether we become a source of oxygen or another tax on everyone’s nervous system. We can craft our habits and schedules (Show up early? Take shorter lunches and focus? Read a BOOK?!?!?)
Change is not only created by the person with the title. It’s crafted by everyone with a pulse in the room, which means how we exist in the environment becomes part of the environment itself.
The Choice is Yours
You either change the environment you exist in or change how you exist in the environment.
That phrase reminds us that we’re not powerless just because the environment is imperfect. We’re not wrong for noticing what’s unhealthy. We’re not weak for being affected by the systems around us. We’re not required to stay in places that consistently diminish us.
But we are responsible for paying attention. We are responsible for considering our impact on the environment as much as we consider the environment’s impact on us.
The real work begins when we stop treating ourselves as passive products of the environment and start seeing ourselves as participants in what the environment becomes.
Because, at the end of the day, it’s all on you. You either change the environment you exist in or change how you exist in the environment.
James Dowd is the Chief Creative Officer and Chief Operating Officer at Rebellion Group, where he helps organizations build stronger leaders, sharper teams, and cultures that move with greater clarity and purpose. His work draws on psychology, psycholinguistics, and human motivation to understand how people think, communicate, make decisions, and respond to change. He’s also the author of Write Dumb and a frequent speaker on leadership, creativity, organizational behavior, and the forces that shape how people work.