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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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How many of y’all find purpose in your career? I try to but ultimately I don’t think my work is that important. I’m not sure what else I could reasonably do that is important, is the problem.
I have people I care about and get meaning from other sources, but work is a perennial stress in my life since I spend so much time on it. Periods in my life where I haven’t had to work have been excellent and I have zero issues finding happiness and meaning, but obviously we have to make a living.
How does everyone else cope with a lack of meaningful employment?
I know this is late, but I just...don't care. I work two jobs, as a delivery driver/owner's crony for a local doordash clone and as a barback/bouncer at my favorite bar. I work, make the boss happy, get paid, end of story.
At my best I enjoy my jobs. When I was a kid I wanted to be a wheelman, and delivering food is kind of the legal version of that. I get paid to be outside all day and drive a (not very nice, mind you) sports car in circles. At the bar, I get paid to hang out and drink at the place I was probably going to be anyway. I card people, make some drinks, haul ice, and clean up. It isn't really hard.
At my worst, at leas my jobs are easy and my bills are paid. I feel resentful for not having enough free time but I probably would've wasted it anyway.
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I don't know if I derive meaning or purpose from my job, but I enjoy it and it's basically the only thing that gives me 'satisfaction' rather than 'pleasure'. My work is neither important, high-status, or well-paid.
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I get no meaning whatsoever from my job, but it’s not very difficult and it’s the first good salary I’ve ever had. I’ve spent a long time looking for more meaningful work at lower pay, but the longer I go without success on this job search the less realistic taking a paycut and starting from the bottom again feels. So I guess I’m in the process of giving up on things I’d care about to take a more comfortable but unfulfilling life. I don’t really enjoy any part of that identity and life-fulfillment wise but I try to remind myself that only a few years ago I would have killed for the security I have now.
Yeah it’s wild how green the grass can get. It’s very strange how our minds work, almost like we’re optimized to never be satisfied whatever we achieve. I suppose in a way we are, since evolution is not kind to idleness.
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I find it meaningful to contribute, whether that is to my family, my work group, my company or society. Preferably what I do accomplishes all these things.
When I felt like I didn't contribute much to either my company, work group or society at my last job (I was still well paid), I just switched jobs.
What line of work are you in?
Sales. I think part of the issue is even though I do contribute, sales just feels slimy to me. It pays well though.
So, you're in a famously soulsucking field that feels "slimy" to you.. To me it sounds like something would be wrong if this gave you meaning.
Ya know, fair point.
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I'm in a weird spot. Out of college, I applied for a lab analysis job, but was reassigned to an environmental compliance job before my first day. Now 11 years later I'm laid off with all my career experience in environmental regulations, despite being right-wing and generally opposed to environmentalism. It's weird trying to navigate that job market without being a true believer.
I think my best career trajectory at this point is to set myself up to step into a policy position after a future conservative purge of the EPA. Wish me luck!
Think you could apply your expertise plus political thinking for a think tank with a focus on regulatory policy like CATO?
No, my expertise is in the hands-on work of actual emissions sampling, not high-level environmental policy.
Ah got it
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There's no market for "how can I do X without getting dinged by regulators" type consultants?
Yes, but the other issue I'm running into is that no one wants to train. They're only looking for people who have done that exact same job for 5 years already. And my job was so niche, the exact same position just doesn't exist anywhere else.
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I worked for the same company from before graduation till the end of 2021, and there were periods between large projects when I was feeling down. But now I work for an even larger company, and I have been stressed out by that feeling of barely treading water.
I switched jobs to grow as a manager, but the experience has been quite different. Back at the old place, I had lots of slack as defined by DeMarco, so I could get down to the bottom of an issue that wasn't my direct responsibility, meet with people in charge of that thing and get them to change it. Here my schedule looks like my boss' boss' schedule back at the old place: double-booked meetings from nine to six. Even when I claw out a couple of hours of peace, I'm so frazzled I can't really concentrate on anything beyond cleaning my mailbox. Even if I could, the place is so huge, I feel like I'm a cog in the machine: the gears turn the way they do, and I'll just get my teeth stripped if I resist. And yet my boss manages to thrive in this environment: she finds time to think, to come up with ideas, to convince others, all this while having a worse schedule.
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I do get small glimmers of satisfaction when I can help patients, but truth be told at my current level, I don't really make much in the way of clinical decisions without a senior consultant calling the shots.
I joined medicine because it was the Default™ path, not because I had any burning passion for it, so I suppose I'll just keep grinding wages until AI leaves me unemployed. The odds really aren't good that I'll make it to consultant level as a psychiatrist and have a field of medicine to practise in.
Is doctor the default path for a lot of folks in India, or was it more of a family thing?
I'm sure a lot of people wish it was the default path, but every year there's like 2 million people competing for about 20k slots for med school!
In my case it, it very much was the latter, my whole family was made up of doctors, running back to before it was a recognized medical qualification. Nothing else spoke to me, and it offers significantly easier opportunities to get out of the country, so I ended up falling into it.
If I didn't have that kind of backing, I wager I'd probably have opted for becoming a programmer instead, I do like the subject, but didn't end up taking programming classes past a certain point because I had to choose between that and biology in the last two years of high school.
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I wish I got more meaning from my relationships to be honest. My partner and my mother are the main two people I care deeply about, but even there I don’t find them to be a significant and reliable source of meaning.
I sometimes wonder if I grew up seeing family more frequently if I would care about relationships more, I had a relatively isolated youth which I’d imagine plays into it.
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My work pays the bills for my family.
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