site banner
PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   2004 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for February 12, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Why do I hate every job I do?

I changed job, like, 4 times in my life. To give a bit of perspective, I did a bit of everything (Public servant in administration, consultancy for a small company, then marketing specialist, now business developer and client & project manager)

EVerytime the job was defined by an initial sense of excitement and wonder, an honeymoon lasting like 6 months, and then complete demoralization and destruction. The reasons are always the same: Sense of abandonement from upper echelon, sense of uselessness, frustration derived from general disorganisation etc.

But after changing several jobs, everytime with radical differences both in theme, position, duties, working hours, wage etc, I am beginning to think that maybe the problem resides with me? I am more of an academic/literate type, always loved to write, read, talk with people. But earning a life with this kind of job is impossible, so I decided to pursue more earthly manners. But still, I feel frustrated, and despite adopting every possible idea to improve on the job (training, strict sleep and relaxation schedule, learning how to focus and external tools to remember tasks etc), I still fail to feel remotely good at something.

I have no idea what to do, I feel way less intelligent than I look like from the external.

I can only assume from those job titles that all of them have been office work of some sort. As someone who works an actually very different job (chef), they all seem very similar. They involve similar environments, similar mundane tasks, and if you hate one you will hate them all.

My partner is an engineer, but her job also falls into the giant "office job" bucket. She has been diagnosed with ADHD (which is something you might find helpful, or maybe not). Diagnosis or not, it is clear to me that the issue primarily lies in the nature of office work. It is hard to keep track of dealines or communications when they are arbitrary and electronic, amd it is hard to force yourself to work on something that seems meaningless. Some people are worse at this than others.

The benefits of her job are that it is stable, relatively well compensated, has health benefits, is flexible, and is physically easier. The benefits of my job are that I am surrounded by creature comforts, get to do things that excite me, I have direct contact with people every day. I invest egregious amounts of time and energy in my job because I love it and it gives me many more benefits than money. Luckily, I now make a decent amount of money too.

I don't think it is just a you problem, because personally I think most jobs suck. But there is usually a trade off when you choose a job out of enjoyment. For skilled trades, I tend to see it as investing the same amount of time as going to school (except you make money instead of spending it). It took me about 8 years to get to a point where I am objectively succesful, and I suspect it will take me another 4 to get where I really want. I think academic jobs outside of actual academics is a tough road, because you potentially have already invested a lot of time and money, only have to invest more in the specific line of work you choose.

So, my advice is that if you truly want a different job, it will come with big trade offs in earnings, and it will take years to reach a point where it becomes monetarily worthwhile. It may come with great benefits to your happiness, social life, self worth, or maybe not. If that doesn’t seem worth it, just keep a job that gives you the best benefits, pay, flexibility, least stress, path for advancement, etc. Stick with it, and you will feel that you will improve with time, but it will probably take something like a year or 2. You will probably feel more competent after you adapt to the arbitrary rules and customs of whatever workplace hierarchy you choose. Use all of your benefits to build a fulfilling life outside of work.

Maybe an important thing to consider: what would you be "working" on if you didn’t need to have a job? You need to have some sense of personal improvment and investment if you aren’t getting it from work. Pursue that in your personal life.

Your attitude strikes me as bizarre. You find work is generally horrible, and yet, you act surprised. Most people rapidly intuit that work something they pay you thousands of dollars for, because otherwise, you wouldn't do it. Why is this hard to understand? Are you a Millennial raised by Boomers or something?

Listen to your Gen X, apple-obsessed buddy: The only non-negotiable element of work is money. Step into your next position with a realistic attitude that says if you do accomplish anything meaningful or have any fun at work, once in a while, ever, that's a good day!

To me it sounds like all 4 types of work you list here are rather...similar?

Enjoying your job is a luxury, and one taken for granted all too often. As far as I'm concerned, all I can really demand of a job is that it compensates me for the time spent doing it, at a rate I don't regret.

It's not that people can't enjoy their work. Quite a few do, and get to work on things they'd be doing as a hobby while getting paid for it. But that's too rare to be considered something to be counted on. The majority of people don't enjoy time spent working, but they don't detest it more than the dollars it brings in.

My job is something that I am mildly pleased to be doing, and occasionally rewarding when it's not bureaucratic makework and drudgery. It's still a job, I don't go into work skipping with a smile on my face, I go do it because it pays better than the alternatives. If you've genuinely exhausted your options when it comes to doing work you enjoy, then at that point you have to make peace with not having fun while at least being paid.

You have your job, and then your career. When the job sucks, you can remind yourself you’re supporting your career. If your career sucks, you can remind yourself you have the means to change to another one as long as you have a job. The end goal is that your job and career are the same and in harmony. Sounds to me like you don’t know what your career is and need to figure that out.

My example; my job is taking photos at expensive restaurants. My career, however, is writing. I use the money from the photography job to buy a website domain to upload my portfolio of writing until I’ve got a good enough one to shoot for the jobs more specialized in writing. That way when I get existential about why the fuck I’m taking pictures instead of writing I can snuff that flame.

I truly believe that 80%+ of whether you have a good time at work is whether you like the people you work with. If you’re friends with your coworkers it rarely feels like work, it’s more like camaraderie.

We all hate our jobs. That's why they have to pay us to do them. If we loved our jobs, we would do them for free.

From "Would You Like Another Plate of This?" by Mike Darwin, as quoted on "On the Unpopularity of Cryonics: Life Sucks, but at Least Then You Die" by Gwern Branwen:

Then there are the other people you must necessarily interact with. Several of the people you work with are complete monsters, in fact, they despise you and they go out of their way to make your job and your hours at work more difficult. And the customers! Most are OK, but some are horrible – encounters with them leave you shaking, and sometimes fearful for your job. Speaking of which, there is always some degree of apprehension present that you might lose your job; you might screw up, the economy may take a nosedive… In any event, your survival is critically dependent upon your job. Others whom you work with are better compensated, and those that own the enterprise you work for are getting rich from it, and that rankles. But, beyond these concerns, this isn’t what you really wanted to do with your life and your time. When you were fifteen, you wanted to _______________, to travel, to see the world, and to meet interesting people and do interesting things. Instead, here you are. And every day you are a little older and a little more run-down. The clock is ticking. When you looked in mirror this morning, you had to face it yet again; you aren’t young anymore and you aren’t going to get any younger.

...

Most people lack autonomy in their daily lives. Next to life itself, freedom is the most precious value; and most people’s lives are functionally devoid of it. Many cryonicists fail to see this, because they are self employed, are in jobs that offer them compensating satisfaction, or that they don’t perceive as “work” (e.g., they are not watching the clock just waiting for the torture to be over for another day).

...

The vast majority of people over 30 don’t feel well a significant fraction of the time. They have colds, flu, osteoarthritis, and most importantly, they are poorly conditioned as a result of jobs that enforce immobility and make them sedentary. As a result, they are tired and drained from their work and home responsibilities at the end of each day, and worst of all, they spend that part of the day when they feel the best and are most alert, doing what other people tell them to do – not what they want to do.

For that reason, I have always gravitated towards jobs that require as little work as possible and leave me free to use the internet or listen to podcasts: night auditor, security guard, delivery driver, etc. I even tried teaching once for the three months of vacation, but I couldn't control the kids.

The pay is awful, but I get by with the Early Retirement Extreme mindset of spending as little as possible (e.g. I don't have health insurance and go to a community health center if I absolutely must). The status hit is worse; my family is disappointed in me and no Western woman is going to be impressed with my job. C'est la vie.

The pay is awful, but I get by with the Early Retirement Extreme mindset of spending as little as possible (e.g. I don't have health insurance and go to a community health center if I absolutely must). The status hit is worse; my family is disappointed in me and no Western woman is going to be impressed with my job. C'est la vie.

Live the dream, random collection of letters I found on the Internet called erwgv3g34! Don't let them grind you down! If I hadn't insisted on having a huge family, you know I'd be knocking on your door on Sunday afternoon asking you if I could have your recycling to take down to the center so I could buy beer!

If we loved our jobs, we would do them for free.

Counterexample, and more general counterassertions.

I love my job. I would not do it for free.

Why? Because I have a finite amount of time available, and there are other things I love more than my job. (Obvious example: owning a roof over my head. Less obvious example: doing only the parts of my job that I enjoy the most.)

Loving other things more than X does not imply I do not love X.
Not wanting X and only X to the exclusion of literally everything else does not imply I do not love X.

Didn’t Cormac McCarthy follow the same mindset? Thought he got himself a wife.

I did read a story of him building his own house, which I suppose points to frugality. But AFAIK he just wanted to write above all else, thus earned little and had little to spend.

But whoever knows more, let me know.

Something like that:

In 1969, the couple moved to Louisville, Tennessee, and purchased a dairy barn,[28] which McCarthy renovated, doing the stonework himself.[27] According to DeLisle, the couple lived in "total poverty", bathing in a lake. DeLisle claimed, "Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week."[12] While living in the barn, he wrote his next book, Child of God (1973).[29] Like Outer Dark before it, Child of God was set in southern Appalachia. In 1976, McCarthy separated from Anne DeLisle and moved to El Paso, Texas.[30]

I keep telling myself that if the next job also doesn't work out, I'll switch to blue-collar work. Something outdoors, if possible. Surely those people will appreciate a heads-in-the-cloud pseudo-intellectual more than the office drones I worked with so far.

You can, but watch out if your IQ is above like 110; keep your head down and castrate your vocabulary or you may soon find everyone else squinting at you in suspicion.

I tried lower-middle class work among some lovely Red Tribe yokels, but made a few missteps early on and rapidly garnered a reputation for being far, far smarter than they were. It did work fine for the first four years, and had a lot of fun with them, but then the Peter Principle saw a petty, insecure moron promoted to the position once occupied by my decent boss, and work became a constant game of bootlicking, kowtowing, and looking over my shoulder. One of the last emails I sent him stated, literally, "I'm sorry you find me hard to understand. I want very much for you to understand me."

TL;DR in a workplace where the average IQ is significantly below yours, beware, for big words = bad words

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats