How to Tell If You Like Your Job …
Article that really got me thinking further:
Quick, answer these questions:
- Do you dread Mondays?
- Do you have big plans for your retirement?
- Do you fantasize about winning the lottery so you can quit your job and live the life of your dreams?
If you answered yes to any of these questions–let alone all of them–there’s a good chance you are wasting your life in the wrong job.
I’ve had enough of trying to find reasons or excuses to motivate myself into believing that I can stay on in my job forever or that I actually like it. The truth is, it’s a safe, fairly pleasant job that I can get by on comfortably for the rest of my working life but I’ll never be truly happy/satisfied/fulfilled/motivated.
You spend most of your waking life at work (and up until then, at school, preparing for your career). If you don’t love what you do and look forward to doing it, that means you are condemning yourself to a life of discontent.
It’s not that every moment at work has to be the best moment ever. As with anything, even the ideal job has its challenges and frustrations. But if you’re just putting in time, waiting for retirement or some other milestone to really live your life, you’re in trouble.
It’s no secret that what we do for a living matters, and has in our culture for a good long time. Why else would people have last names such as Baker, or Butcher, or Smith? It’s because, in many senses, our jobs define us–even though we aren’t required to change our last names to Proctologist or Secretary these days.
“What do you do?” is a standard question we ask when we meet people. Work is important because it pays the bills, lends structure to our lives, and gives us identity.
Til now I really dread going to school, making it through the year etc. I can’t keep proper records and now I absolutely do not care anymore. My heart’s not there. But i’m trying to do my best til the time comes because taking MC is simply not a way out for me. One false assumption is if you’re smart enough and you work hard enough, you can do anything. The problem with this is that we fail to listen to our true desires, and substitute intensity of work for actual passion for something. There’s a difference between working feverishly and having a burning passion–a difference that requires soul-searching to understand.
What’s more, being smart doesn’t make it any easier to figure out what you want to do with your life–the key to job satisfaction is to search for something meaningful, significant, and fulfilling (as opposed to exciting, challenging, and stimulating, which can be a trap).
So baby, thank you for allowing me to go find something that I want to do. I should have job-hopped, I should have taken a gap year. But since I didn’t do that earlier Im going to do so in future! Many people live lives of sorts just to finance material trappings. I too want a nice flat of my own and a nice van of my own. I realise I need money for that to happen (and for you to take a break). But i figure that I can earn less, spend less and be happier. And as you’ve been trying to tell me, no point me worrying about being a liability and struggling on. Better to make a clean beark and get ‘cured’ once and for all.
And well, if I put aside my strong. cheerful, independent mask, my inner world is a messy, cottony-soft topsy-turvy place. I’ve had enough. I cry easily because I have so many bottled up emotions inside of me that I’ve had no outlet for for years.
All a person needs to know to be happy is to know
1) how to find meaningful work, 2) how to get along with others, and 3) how to persevere when things get tough (which implies both optimism and ongoing learning).
I can learn to be resilient. But it must be for a purpose and worth it! I guess my 2) and 3) have been impacted by my lack of 1). Take the weekend for example. I had a great time running around but I felt worried that I had piles of undone work and I felt unhappy that Monday was fast approaching. Silly to worry about that but well, that’s my reality. But haha at least today I started work! Yay! 9 mths to July and the end of teaching torture!
Think about what you always wanted to do. Our careers don’t necessarily take the fantasy shape they did when we were children, but even as children, we have the capacity to know what effort delights us most.
Of course, you do need to figure out how much you can realistically make following your dream, and how you will cover those pesky little things like health insurance. If your dream job is with a company that provides such things, great. If you want to be self-employed, you have to figure out how much money you need to live on, after taxes–which are higher for self-employed people–as well as health insurance and the like. There are lots of books with helpful insight in this area. The key here is to value yourself and your skills, and have faith that people will pay you for them.
Another key is to give yourself time. This is separate from giving yourself deadlines–those help keep you on track, but there is no formula for how long it will take to rebuild your life the way you want it to be. It could take several years. But that time will pass no matter what you do. It’s better that you spend it reaching toward a goal than gritting your teeth until retirement, and wondering what could have been.
And finally, you have to give yourself permission. No matter how much you’ve spent on your education or how much time you’ve invested in your career, what matters in the end is that you’re doing something that fills your life with meaning. You deserve no less.
That’s right. Enough of the justifications. JUST DO something about IT already piggy!
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Currently reading: Depression: The Way out of your Prison by Dorothy Rowe
I want to paint my walls a myriad of cheery or soothing colours and also stencil in pithy aphorisms or maxims such as Lao Tzu’s
Because a sage always confronts difficulties
He never experiences them
Or phrases from verses or poems that I like, such as Blake’s
To see a World in a grain of sand
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour
