Well yes, but that's precisely the problem: our career expectations have, as anyone who's done a job interview can tell you, gotten pretty extreme.
I left a bad job once, and for months interviewed in loads of places and didn't get any job. I'm fairly sure it was because I truly sucked at explaining away the bad job time and why I left without "sounding like he doesn't want to work."
There should be nothing wrong, in "True Scotsman capitalism" or "True Scotsman career development", with leaving a bad job if it just can't work out for you -- particularly when you're young, unmarried, and not in debt. But somehow there is. Every bad job is a black mark on you. If interviewers don't view it that way, you've often trained yourself to view it that way. I certainly did. Haven't quite gotten over it yet.
(Admittedly, after a few months I started finding different crowds of people and eventually got a contract position that could have become full-time if I was still looking for full-time work by then.)
The point I was trying to make is that the lifestyle I led through college in some ways fed in to my willingness to do the same thing professionally. I never knew any better.
If things had gone differently, I could still be killing myself on a daily basis. And for what? The possibility of making a few more bucks?
