There’s this tug-of-war inside of me that puts me in this difficult position.

I love what I’m doing as a journalist and editor. I like to mentor others. I love picking the brains of executives and learn a lot of things, about sectors or niche areas that I don’t normally encounter—things like sustainable aviation fuels and the feedstock for those. Just today, the exec I was interviewing said our conversation is thought-provoking because I asked things that he has not even thought about. Now that I sparked an idea, he has to delve into these things more closely, like vertical integration of some businesses or some strategies for the horizontals.

The thing is I don’t like my company’s parent company. This is the difficulty when you get acquired; you have no say about the changes and this is not what you have signed up for when you first joined the company. The system has gone bad, which is why I lose people and it’s hard to hire.

I saw a job ad on LinkedIn that matches my qualifications and it’s mid-senior level and completely remote, in the sense I can work anywhere in Asia. It also has regional travels. While I can do the communication campaigns and strategy, it’s not exactly the thing I love to do. It’s not an issue of comfort level since I know I can do it. It’s just that my heart is not into it.

And life is too short to be doing things that you don’t like or love.

My ex-boss here in local media left the industry to head a department of one institution and thought he could wing it with his MBA. But he didn’t like what he was doing and some feedback I got from other people who have worked with him indicated that he messed up. So now he wants to go back to our industry but senior level positions are rare. VERY rare. I’m afraid of turning into what he has become–that I will mess up because I don’t like what I’m doing. That I got out of the frying pan and went straight into the fire.

Now that I’m interviewing candidates for the job openings under my team, I am sensitive to whether the candidates just want to escape the current employment or they genuinely like or are interested in covering what we cover. One candidate I interviewed just wants to come back to Singapore after finishing her master’s degree in broadcasting and film production. I asked her, how can she reconcile that fact that what we do is very different from what she pursued for her higher degree? She said she learned now that broadcasting and film will not feed her because that industry is unstable. I immediately put her in the bottom of the pile because what we do is very difficult and if she doesn’t like it, she will have difficulty staying afloat. Chances are she will quit in 6 months. She will just use us as her ticket to come back to Singapore.

Another candidate just wants to get out of her current company because I heard rumors about that media entity that they’re not that great, to put it mildly.

That will be the same for me when I apply for this job posting on LinkedIn. My heart will not be into it as I’m just looking for a way to escape the annoying parent company. It will show during my prospective interviews. So basically I would be wasting my time and the hiring company’s time.

So I don’t know.

But this stream of consciousness I’m doing—THIS—verbalizing it is making things a bit clearer. The more I am writing about this now, the more that my heart says I pass up this job opportunity because it is not yet THE ONE.

I know being choosy has risks, especially that I’m in mid-senior to senior roles now. But choosing peace of mind is not at all petty, no?