how do you deal with doing a job that you don't like and not doing anything that means anything?

so i have this job that i do, and i am ok at it. i work pretty hard, but ultimately i don't enjoy it. it feels empty cuz i don't have passion for it. what i really wanna do is paint and make music, ya know? but then most days i just come home and watch tv. does anyone else have this type of affliction and if so how do you get around these types of feelings? i mean i feel like if i died today i would be disappointed with the output of my life. like everybody tells you as a kid growing up that you will be great, but prolly 90% of people are not great. so i have joined the ranks of the not-great people and i am having trouble accepting it, i guess.

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/

get an mfa everyone's doing it/done it

everyone experiences this to varying degrees, from what i've gathered over the years

look for a new job that doesn't leave you feeling vacant, and force yourself to not watch tv. painting / making music will be much, much, much more rewarding, even if you're exhausted

http://content.humorpix.com/images/3142/p001.jpg

damn

i think i may be at "compromise"

or maybe commitment

i might be at the brink of failure and commitment, but i'm doin it wit a smile baby!

I'm at failure #1

apparently not getting any play for a while

"humorpix"

I felt like this for years to the point of being so frustrated I knew I had to do something so I put myself in debt by going back to school for my MA and now I'm unemployed so . . . YAY! ;-) Seriously though I just got to the point where I couldn't stand doing shitty jobs I didn't care about at all. It was killing me. If I hadn't gone back to school I would have quit and returned to waitressing or bartending because I made almost as much money doing those things and enjoyed them a hell of a lot more.

man, i miss school

I bitched about how much work it was and how tired it was the whole time I was back in school but now I miss it! I sorta wish I could just go and sit in on classes I'm interested in but not have to actually do any work. lol. I wonder if ppl who audit classes have to actually, you know, write stuff.

(Feeling posts 1 and 2 of this thread, for sure.)

E, I'm definitely not going back to school, but I am super close to pursuing your second option (waiting tables or whatever). I have a job that somehow mixes a high level of responsibility with an almost complete lack of meaning or purpose. Not to mention that it's low-paying and not at all satisfying or anything that I went to school to do or have any interest in. I kinda don't understand how I wound up in this jam.

it feels empty cuz i don't have passion for it. what i really wanna do is paint and make music, ya know? but then most days i just come home and watch tv

i know all too well the backhanded face-slap of being so bored at a job that the boredom itself manages to extract more energy than a satisfying job would. whereas people who love their jobs have all the energy in the world to devote to extreme sports, building ships in bottles, etc

Although now that I've been gainfully employed for a while, I'm realizing lately that I finally have the latitude to pursue the full-time freelance design career that I'd dreamt of previously. Not to mention the fact that the economy is slightly less in the tank than it was when I was first seriously entertaining those thoughts.

Deric I thought about doing it for a long long time and didn't because I felt like I should be doing something "more" than that at that point in my life but got to a point where I realized that idea was a ridiculous and that if waitressing or bartending would make me happier (which it would have) then so be it. If I hadn't gotten into the program I applied to there is no question that I would have quit my job and done just that.

If you can do the freelance thing and you think you'd be able to make $$ and enjoy it then go for it. Seriously.

man i felt like this for years about my job and what made it worse was that i didn't even have any good ideas about what i'd rather be doing. it was really bad. so in the end i just quit without any backup plan and now i'm unemployed and not quite sure what happens next. it's not an ideal situation to be in (in fact it sucks quite a lot too) but i just had to get out of that place.

going back to uni is one thing i'm thinking about. ppl who did that after a long time out of education....did it work out well for you? i don't love the idea of being the only guy nearing 30 in a room full of 21-year-olds with everyone thinking 'what has that guy been doing with his life' etc etc.

To me, this question is very April 4 (the day before I was laid off).

xp, i took a class at a local community college this summer (5 years after leaving uni) and did quite well. i seemed to be older than most of the other students; they would spend the whole class just playing around on facebook or nfl.com

I can relate to those students

i'm 12 months away from being permanent & pensionable in the public sector, and it's a thought both comforting and terrifying. 36 years of counting the days left, but the work is fine, doing some good most days and private sector workplaces have sucked ime.

I've been feeling like this for a few months. I've been doing the same job (with different companies) for about 12 years, slowly climbing up a ladder that I couldn't give a shit about anymore. I get paid pretty well but go home every night bored and miserable. I'd happily take a largeish pay cut to do something that makes me happy, but I don't know what job that is, and I think that at 37 I may have left it too late.

I am happy to say I don't relate at all. But then I do realize I don't know any differently cause I've been doing the same thing since I was 19 years old (17 years!!!!). I love running our shop. Even though it causes anxiety attacks at times, I know it's not the job itself but my fear of the "unknown" or instability. But damn I do like running a shop: meeting people,...

I relate all too much. But the idea of having left it too late is one that should be resisted - friend has a story about some guy in late thirties or forties who wants to jack it all in and become a doctor, but thinks he's left it far too late, it's crazy to go back to college at that time in his life, and it would take seven years! That's a helluva long time! "Ah well", says his elderly dad in his thick scottish accent, "The time will pass anyway".

My mother jacked it all in aged about 50 to become a priest. The ladies of my family are kind of living proof that it isn't actually too late if you genuinely KNOW what it is you want to do.

However, this doesn't help if you don't really know what it is you want. Which has always been my problem.

how do you deal with doing a job that you don't like and not doing anything that means anything?

I get by by never asking myself that question :(

At the beginning of this year I quit work to go back to study. OK it was a bit of a toy throwing exercise. I was in a fairly dull job which wasn't going anywhere & I was not being given training to fulfil the role. Now I am working part-time at a very very horrible job and desperately looking for other employment to supplement my income while I study.

Not much luck, I can see prospective employers' eyes narrow as they wonder "why haven't you got a career yet?" and "you are not fresh-faced and enthusiastic enough to work for minimum wage & you will scare the customers". Well I would see that if I ever got interviews. Somtimes I try to pretend it's because I'm a demmed furreigner. Otherwise I'd have to accept that I have somehow drifted through life with no marketable skills. Perhaps at the end of this, my third bout of Uni?

With that experience in my mind I'd say try to hang in at your current job but look for something more interesting and fulfilling. But think of work as a means to fund your artistic pursuits rather than something that will give your life purpose. We must all approach life with a protestant grimace and outpost-of-the-empire fortitude...

think of work as a means to fund your __________ pursuits rather than something that will give your life purpose

can't really be stressed enough, i think.

Hard when your dayjob/commute leaves you too flat out exhausted to explore your ______ pursuits, tho.

Every job I have got in the past 10 years has offered me more and more money. I do not want more money. I want more time off to pursue my _________ pursuits. I'd gladly trade 1/5 of my salary for one day a week off. But no one ever seems to bite.

(Though one of my bandmates did actually manage to get this holy grail of employment)

i was in a boring job and i quit so i could travel and teach (my desired ____?____ pursuit) and now i feel much more like im on track in terms of what i wanted to do IN LIFE even though the process of getting here and dismantling everything familiar etc was difficult and a little scary at times. i guess im lucky in that im able to eke out a living doing this, what i want to be doing, though im not sure what the endgame is and i have sacrificed a fair amount of security in order to do it, and obv not everyone can just drop everything...but, worth it for me, or at least it feels like it is for now.

My old boss used to own a recording studio in Monmouth, and he offered me a job as a live-in general manager. God, I wish I'd said yes!

I wonder if ppl who audit classes have to actually, you know, write stuff.

my gf is going this and the answer is generally no.

this thread is me to an extent--i don't really care abt my job, it's fine, i'm really well-paid all things considered. i intend to do something else when i finish grad school but tbh i don't ever think i'll be too passionate about any job.

I am happy to say I don't relate at all. But then I do realize I don't know any differently cause I've been doing the same thing since I was 19 years old (17 years!!!!). I love running our shop. Even though it causes anxiety attacks at times, I know it's not the job itself but my fear of the "unknown" or instability. But damn I do like running a shop: meeting people,...
― Nathalie (stevienixed), Friday, September 25, 2009 6:15 AM (5 hours ago)

my gurl and i were discussing this same thing and this type of thing came up. i thought i would love to do something that I OWN. IT's MINE. that would make all the bullshit that one has to do so worth it. i mean i wouldn't mind doing like 60-80 hour weeks if it meant that i was working for myself.
so ride on stevienixed you smug mothafocka

I get by by never asking myself that question :(

― Bacon is the new Pirates (onimo), Friday, September 25, 2009 6:53 AM

yea me and my gurl totally covered that one too in our discussion. i just don't fuckin think about it sometimes, and then there's other times when it's like a big blinking roadsign on every fucking goddamn road i go down.

you just get used to it after a while.

I don't think that's the answer!

dudes
i came up on a few days off
that's always nice to do when you hate yr job!

the real answer to this question is holidays and weekends

with this time off i plan to kick
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxuXJB2ymC0&feature=related

i deal with this quite a bit. to an extent, i've pretty much accepted that i won't do much better than my current retail job - maybe slightly higher up the management ladder, but i'll always be stuck in retail or something similar. i'm not passionate about it, i find it pretty boring, esp after the first year once you've learned every tiny thing there is to learn, the pay is shit (altho i got lucky and my boss is paying for 3/4 of my health insurance), it's next to impossible to organise time off, but i'm pretty good at it (i should hope so, after doing it for 15yrs). i have a useless degree in english lit, but i'm still glad i got it.

i think i'd hate it much much less if it was MINE, too - not having to answer to a boss, not having to pretend to be 'busy' when she turns up (i just finished making a bunch of handmade books the last 2 days, she would have been mad if she'd caught me), being able to run things how i want. my boss has owned this store for 25yrs and still doesn't seem to know wtf she's doing.

i'd also really like to just have my own little studio to make stuff in and sell. which isn't an impossibility at this stage, just waiting for my husband's climb up the corporate ladder to go a little higher so we can afford to cut my income.

In July 08 I had enough of my 'career', I was, essentially, doing the same work I was employed to do 10 years before. I had, over the years, been awarded pay rises and even company employee of the year. My future offered no progression, no further responsibility and no autonomy in my day to day routine. I interviewed for jobs I was overqualified for just to 'get out' but I was confronted with procrastination over job offers, changing job descriptions, no feedback at all etc. In Sept 08 I moved out of my London flat, and rented it out, started a Access course to higher education and a year later (this week) I enrolled at a good university to do a BSc.

I know it's going to take a few years to get to where I want to be but this is worth it. I love learning, and I love not having to ever do that job again. Jabba Hands, I'm 32 and yeah it is weird being in a room of mainly 18-19 year-olds but I don't have any hang-ups, I couldn't have done this before (mainly for financial reasons) and even though I hated my job I am proud of some of what I have achieved. I'm not resident in halls so I don't pretend to be anything I'm not.

"so ride on stevienixed you smug mothafocka"

hehehe i will!

I'm back in school as well, getting a degree that'll take six years in a field with pretty pathetic employment prospects because I have a good idea that it's what I really want to do, or at least the thing I most want to do that I have the best idea of how to proceed in. I'm happy to be studying right now, it's great, but I definitely wonder if I'll feel sorry for thinking in terms of present excitement instead of future security when I graduate. Still, I think it's worth a try right?

i dealt with this feeling by quitting my job and taking a budget trip to Croatia.

i've been hearing a lot about croatia as a vacation destination lately! was that a good strategy?

good on you mmmm, sounds like you've made the right decisions. i hope to be following in yr footsteps soonish!

x-post croatia is awesome. u didn't go to the electric elephant did u max?

I have avoided climbing career ladders at all costs. Unfortunately, in the current state of Late American Capitalism, this choice appears to have made me marginally unemployable.

so after my recent post upthread, i got a total bollocking by my boss yesterday/today, basically put the onus of making 3 stores (one of which i've never worked at, the other i work at maybe once a week) successful on my shoulders. i am not even a manager. i get paid the same as the parttime student workers.

anyway it was totally awful and really fucked me right off, considering how much effort i DO put into this terrible boring job, where i'm employed by someone who still doesn't know what the fuck they're doing even after 27yrs of doing the same thing. jesus christ.

but there is a good possibility that i may have the opportunity to chuck it in, or at least go parttime, and start running a tiny wee business from home, and now more than ever i'm determined to do it. i'll probably know in about 3 months. at this point in my life, i care less about making a lot of money than i do about having enough to live on and just being reasonably content.

fwiw despite all my Queen Keep It Positive posts in this thread I just got promoted and now feel even more hopeless about my job prospects, am applying for city jobs and other shit, have lost count of resumes sent out and am frankly sick of it but i guess this is how it works

my dad reminded me today that "you send out a hundred resumes and get one call" and i about cried

hoos i dig your take on this actually, i have those same awesome yawning moments of "holy shit i am an actual living being enjoying myself" moments on the regular

Ugh Justin3 I feel ya, the craziest bosses I've had had been small-business owners.

one thing i gotta give props to the US for: it is actually a real possibility that i could quit my job and work from home selling shit on etsy. not gonna make much $$$, but i could never do that in a million years in NZ.

yeah abbs, my boss is my nemesis right now, if she wants me to make her more money she should have given me a peptalk, not a major dressing down. my confidence is shot and i really don't feel like doing shit to improve the business now. how has she managed to be in business for 27yrs. oh and she let me know that's she $50,000 in the hole on her credit cards, barely making the minimum monthly payment, etc etc.

at this point in my life, i care less about making a lot of money than i do about having enough to live on and just being reasonably content.

Yeah, that's a good way to look at it. I can afford to work part-time for most of the year, which gives me the extra time to do things I think are worthwhile and make me happy. I have a job that I don't mind, though occasionally my boss throws some last minute large project at me (like now).

Nah, that's the thing--thinking that way gives me a renewed sense of perspective and even purpose

Thinking that way gives me a renewed sense of chance, randomness, and meaninglessness. The universe plays out a happy event for one person, and simultaneously being crushed in an earthquake for another.

For some reason, where I work seems to contain quite a high percentage of workaholics - who always strike me as people who've sensed the meaninglessness of life and are desperately try to imposing their own kind of meaning, order and control. It's a poor strategy and it's not as if they radiate the joy of being caught up in their work or anything.

Bring on full automation, and all the work being done by robots.

law firm?

OK - it's public sector, so they could be motivated by good reasons...But I don't really sense that workaholics are motivated by a "I made the world a little bit better for everyone when I left work on Friday evening after 100 hour week". There's something a lot more complicated going on.

oh definitely. I used to be one of those people that worked 80-100 hour weeks for something of questionable value and importance. Getting fired from that job was probably one of the best things to happen to me. Not that everything is all rosy and wonderful in my world of work now, but I can leave work at work, and have energy to do things I enjoy and time to do them.

Hang on, I thought you're living in your parents house which you hope they might pass onto you? Did they also pass on the business?

Yes. Actually when I was in my early twenties my mom banged on about it and I got into a major depression because I figured I would never be able to run the business my parents had built from nothing. (However I am able to make 20 mile long sentences as you can see.) I already get a percentage on the sales (hence making more than just a manager.) Now I actually wouldn't dream of doing it differently. On paper it's still their business so I guess I shouldn't even say it's "my" business. But in reality we pretty much run it for them (while they have their business in Japan). I suspect in about five years it'll be officially ours? I don't know. It just works out well this way. And, yes, the house will be ours. They hate how it's so big (hah!) and they expressed never EVER wanting to live in it. :-D

Not sure how it works in other countries, but from what I see around me, family businesses are run this way. The children enter the business and most will continue to work for their parents for a long time and then more or less take over.

it's funny -- as a teenager and in my 20s I vowed I would never do what my mom did for a living -- and now I sort of do just that, and it's actually fairly pleasant, and I haven't turned into her.

xp - it depends on the business. Farming in the US definitely works that way.

One of the reasons I got into a depression: she expressing to me how disappointed she was that I hadn't turned into her (aka a work horse -> not farm related though hahah). I need to "cut off" for a while, form my own identity (and as such be able to form relationships, on all levels). Then I (figurately speaking) came back. All that time I did work for them though. Now I see it's so much fun. I am very similar to her: we looooooove sales.

Farming in Aus used to work that way too but the drought is forcing a lot of rural youngsters off farms because they're basically "fuck a poverty" and you can't blame them really. Its so sad. Generations-old farm industries going to the wall.

me & my mom work in different industries: she works for farmers and I work for artists and arts non-profits, but we both do bookkeeping/office management/tax stuff. In some ways we're similar - we don't like waste, and like finding and fixing mistakes, and we also like our leisure time. She's currently off vacationing in France.

xp - farming here in northern california is also a struggle. Besides the drought, there's the problem with getting low-balled on crop prices by places like Wal-Mart. During the real estate boom, farmers where i grew up were selling off their land to developers of houses and big chain retail, because it was more profitable.

Yeah I think thats happening everywhere, cos of places like China flooding US/Aus/UK markets with tons of cheap shitty import food.

in the case of the US a lot of the cheap food is coming from Mexico and Latin America, though Chinese garlic I'm pretty sure has seriously depressed prices

Yah was garlic in partic I was thinking of. I buy local garlic now, but its $25 a kg which is completely insane.

garlic is one of my mom's employers' major crops, so everytime she comes up to visit, she brings me enough to last until her next visit.

Keeps True Blood's Eric away, don't accept it!

How the hell can Human Resources not have a policy on the books about Repetitive Strain Injury???

"Well, Tantrum, use your health insurance to get some physio and maybe see a chiropractor, make sure you document everything, and then we'll take it from there."

This is a fucking IT company!!! Do they seriously expect me to believe that I'm the first person to come forward with these issues?

I admit I was actually hoping they called you Tantrum. (More seriously, what clowns.)

*Laughing*

Anyway, yeah, these people suck.

And I am NOT seeing a chiropractor. Jeez.

tantrum: perhaps a chiro could do some amazing shit. you never know if you don't see one. my drummer swears by his dude, and his spine is mad fucked up.

I've heard WAY too many horror stories about chiropractors. What I AM doing is getting assessed by a neurologist in December, and getting a referral for a physiotherapist.

job currently consists of manning the phones taking constant abuse for things i've no control over. i mean non-stop queues of calls waiting to shout at me. i need to do a course or something.

course of happy pills amirite?

time to start hardmanning the phones imo

i mean non-stop queues of calls waiting to shout at me.

'Welcome' to IT support?

i replaced going to counselling with doing an acting class and i can honestly say it's the happiest i've been in ages.

so i'd advise either changing job, or doing something creative and adopting a more "AH SURE FUCK IT" attitude (that is if the money and general conditions aren't so bad that moving jobs is absolutely essential)

tax helpline

(IT support AKA the job that gave me a stomach ulcer from dealing with a) supposedly adult clients throwing toddler tantrums, b) skivers who were looking to shift the blame onto a convenient scapegoat ie me, c) total wankers)

is that yr permanent job or just the duties you're currently assigned to with the possibility of something less fraught if you behave yrself?

it's what i'll be doin for as long as i'm in dublin, unfortunately (march 2014 at least)

ok drama class or happy pills it is

that sounds grim

people phoning up helplines to moan incessantly = idiots who don't realize the number is there to mollify them and that they are essentially getting played too

drama class i think

nakh kinda otm, but tbf to these guys they're being sent tax bils in error for a hotly resented new property tax, so flippant hardman isn't agl from yrs truly neither. I'm offering it up like matt talbot.

just trying to mollify you, deems

no but srsly i have had recent experience of tax related idiocy and while the customer helpline ppl were often kinda useless, it wasn't their fault to begin with

moving jobs lol, ppl are begging to get in here on worse terms than mine tbh

tks but i very rarely need mollifying, i've met a couple of mollies and tbh they didn't rly suit me

if there are things you can do in the evenings it might help a lot. if you did something intensive like say, two nights a week for 2/3 hours, i find you then are focussing on that thing a lot and it can occupy your mind and butt work out of the way a bit. i'd say a course in anything where you actually learning something concrete and it's well taught would be good. for me i find this makes work seem less important.

you're otm i'm casting about me atm for a course or something similar to occupy the evenings.

this combined with running has basically been a silver bullet for me.

i'm p aware that i need to get my arse in gear ito getting out of this kind of frontline work, i mean i have a gf whose main job it is to remind me tby