Do You Associate A Non-childhood Home City With Bad Memories?

In 2020, pre-COVID, I moved to Seattle because I joined Microsoft. Because I hated the job and product I was assigned to, I associate Seattle with bad memories. I moved back to NYC in 2024 and started a business, but when I visited Seattle last year, the bad memories sprung right back. Is this common?

While there is a lot of discussion on trauma from childhood homes, I have a lesser-known scenario: trauma from the city of a job I hated.

Like I mentioned earlier, I moved to Seattle for work since I got a job with Microsoft. Despite that, I'm not a Windows fan, I use Fedora Linux at home and also own a MacBook as a second laptop.

But operating system discussion aside, I hated the product I was placed on: Viva Insights. I believe this product is workplace surveillance. But that's not the entire point here.

Because I hated what I worked on, many things happened. I not only performed poorly at work, I gained weight, becoming pre-diabetic. My mental health became trash. I became addicted to the internet and shopping, because it was a distraction from facing the reality of working on surveillance. My checking account had at most a few hundred dollars, and even though I was investing some money, I was spending far more.

I told people around be I hate the job, yet people thought I was crazy. They told me how great my job was, how it's Big Tech, etc. Yet I was breaking mentally.

I tried to get other jobs. But because the job market is generally poor, nobody really wanted to hire me. I deeply hated working with Big Data, but since there was initially the LeetCode issue in the early 2020s when the market was good, and later the poor market, alternative employment was basically impossible. I once got far in a Linux engineer interview, but they still said no.

Only after moving back to NYC, leaving Microsoft, starting a business and doing tDCS did my mental health improve. And even then, there was still enough damage done. When I visited Seattle post-leaving Microsoft, all the bad memories sprung back. Sometimes I wish I could tell my 22-year-old self to go anywhere else, even work at a Geek Squad or Genuis Bar before joining Microsoft.

While my mom blames the COVID pandemic, I talked to a friend and they said they was an actuary at a medical company and have bad memories of Chicago the way I do about Seattle, that probably pre-COVID.

Do you associate bad memories of a city of a job you hated (versus childhood trauma)?