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WORK SUCKS: Talk About Your Job

I hate my job, and I can't figure out what I want to do with my life. :p

I tried going to college, but I hated that even more. At least with a shitty job, I get paid to be bored and unhappy. In college, I was paying for it.
 
my office just closed and there's no snow on the ground. so different than my last job, where there was no weather policy other than the office is closed during government declared weather emergencies.

bitch is i have an 8 a.m. dentist appointment. and a little work that still needs to be done, which will be slightly tricky or maybe impossible without access to the common/networked hard drive at the office. still an overall nice way to start the weekend!
 
I think one has to have a career in mind before they go through the education for it, and the most important thing of course is passion. I got through college in 4 years studying something I loved, but wasn't prepared for the fact that in order to get a standard 35-40k salary (a decent but not great wage in the US... it's live-able) would require additional school. That's just the way it is in the USA now, however. The job market for all but a handful of majors can demand grad school and not have their application #s suffer. I never wanted or intended to go to grad school, which meant that for the last 3 years I was stuck applying for positions that had "Masters preferred" written all over them, sadly. Now I'm just working regular $10 an hour jobs as I make my way through applying for a trade apprenticeship. Many people don't know it, but trades pay well and have some of the best job security. I have an interview in the next 4-5 weeks or so, after which--should they select me--there is a waiting list. The good part is that apprenticeships pay a liveable wage during the 3-4 year on the job training that one must go through. It's a pretty legit deal tbh.
 
SirTophamHat said:
and the most important thing of course is passion.
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Interesting how opinions can vary on this one. I think passion is important, but e.g. my dad tries to tell me that chasing your passion is pointless, as far as I can tell. TBH I think he's just trying to rationalize the fact that his career is completely soulless capitalistic shit.
 
The way I look at it is that loving one's work is going to lead to less stress down the line, which will lengthen your life or at least how enjoyable life is. I really don't care how much money I make as long as I can still pay the bills and save. The important thing is getting up in the morning excited to work, rather than dreading it. It doesn't matter if that work is picking apples in an orchard or being an aircraft mechanic.

Medical workers have very stressful jobs, but if they enjoy it, that's got to make up for the stress at least somewhat. I think one problem is that a person could love the idea of a certain job, and then once they finish their training or schooling for it, find out they don't like it. That's actually happened to a couple people I know. It's sad, and from a 3rd person perspective, hard to understand. It does occur though. Too often we are taught to go after jobs in demand rather than explore what we love. I have three friends who went into Art as a major, which is typically frowned up. Two of them work for a major company with good job security and the last one does freelance work @ $50/hr, which is more than my parents make with graduate education. They're all in their 20s.

IMO I don't think passion is absolutely necessary, as some people are good at "pushing through" and doing a job for the bills. I do think it should be the primary factor in choosing a career for 95%+ of us, because with enough passion the hardships along the way seem like pebbles rather than boulders.

TAC, if working a shitty job is better than being in school for you, try to find an enjoyable job. There are plenty of enjoyable low wage jobs, so a lame one that pays the same shouldn't be acceptable for you.
 
SirTophamHat, good luck on your apprenticeship!

TheAppleCore, sucks you don't know what you want to do yet. All I can tell you is to try many different things, you're bound to find something! Ask friends if they know of any jobs/apprenticeships.
 
SirTophamHat said:
The way I look at it is that loving one's work is going to lead to less stress down the line, which will lengthen your life or at least how enjoyable life is. I really don't care how much money I make as long as I can still pay the bills and save. The important thing is getting up in the morning excited to work, rather than dreading it. It doesn't matter if that work is picking apples in an orchard or being an aircraft mechanic.
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i think there's a lot of middle ground between working a soul-crushing job in pursuit of more money and following your passion regardless of income. in particular, i think there are a lot of people who find "non-exciting" jobs that are interesting enough, put them around nice people, and provide them with the free time and disposable income to pursue their passions outside of work. you talk about the stress of not loving one's work, but constant financial stress can make you just as miserable (and the older you get, the more money it takes to barely make ends meet). a lot of people end up compromising between the two, and are happier for it.

the other thing to consider is that just because you are passionate about something, doesn't mean that a job in that field will make you happy. you may still end up working long hours on boring projects in a miserable corporate environment. ad agencies, for example, are full of people who technically are being paid to be creative. but they work long, unpredictable hours meeting the demands of corporate clients, and get paid very little to do it. meanwhile at the bank, there are people doing work that sounds a lot less exciting, but they're getting paid double or triple and going home at 5 every day*. i have peers in both types of jobs, and i wouldn't say one group is happier or better off than the other. but there's a lot more grey area than the "corporate drone" vs. "follow your passion" dichotomy suggests.

*there are also poor fucks working hundred hour weeks doing jobs that would bore you to tears. nobody should do that.
 
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Man, if I worked 100 hours, my paycheck would be sweet! Closest I came was 71 :/
 
Thank you for the well-wishing, Tude!

double ewe said:
i think there's a lot of middle ground between working a soul-crushing job in pursuit of more money and following your passion regardless of income. in particular, i think there are a lot of people who find "non-exciting" jobs that are interesting enough, put them around nice people, and provide them with the free time and disposable income to pursue their passions outside of work. you talk about the stress of not loving one's work, but constant financial stress can make you just as miserable (and the older you get, the more money it takes to barely make ends meet). a lot of people end up compromising between the two, and are happier for it.
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Very good point! Compromising is realistic and can be the best (most pragmatic) option much of the time. I didn't mean to paint a black and white picture with my opinion; I see now how it could have come across that way.

the other thing to consider is that just because you are passionate about something, doesn't mean that a job in that field will make you happy. you may still end up working long hours on boring projects in a miserable corporate environment. ad agencies, for example, are full of people who technically are being paid to be creative. but they work long, unpredictable hours meeting the demands of corporate clients, and get paid very little to do it. meanwhile at the bank, there are people doing work that sounds a lot less exciting, but they're getting paid double or triple and going home at 5 every day*. i have peers in both types of jobs, and i wouldn't say one group is happier or better off than the other. but there's a lot more grey area than the "corporate drone" vs. "follow your passion" dichotomy suggests.

*there are also poor fucks working hundred hour weeks doing jobs that would bore you to tears. nobody should do that.
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I totally agree, a lot of the time job satisfaction cannot be predicted by merely having a passion for the field itself. Each job may have its own idiosyncrasies that may or may not jive with the individual. This is part of why I think trade schools should be of a bigger importance/hyped up more in the states. As you work towards completion of the training, more often than not you are placed in the working environment during the education. Much easier to see where you're going to end up that way. 4/5 times or more college/university doesn't allow for that type of clairvoyance.
 
I'm still looking for work currently...I'm graduating in December with a BA in humanities from a well respected university, don't plan on giving any names, but, nevertheless...I've had a very light schedule recently (just a few hours to finish up) and have looked into the market somewhat but I am at a bit of a loss for where to go, exactly. I'm definitely not the 'corporate' type and have no real desire to go into academia or teaching, although both of those professions would go well with my humanities education, in a way. Not really desiring to return to being a waiter or getting into a 8/10 dollar an hour job situation, but, well, like I said, I'm not really sure where to go with my education at the moment. I have next to no technical training, just countless hours spent on writing and academic research under my belt which essentially equals little to no pragmatic, real world, value. Unless I improve drastically in my corporate interviewing skills in the next year, I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I'll probably be working for a time in the type of jobs that I've been dealing with all throughout college, i.e., relatively unskilled work that pays near or only a bit more than minimum wage. Sorry to say, but purely humanities-related degrees are seeming, at least to me, to be increasingly unnecessary in a world run on abstract figures and advanced scientific technological know how.

If you're asking why I would say that now and have gone through the process of having achieved a humanities B.A. in the first place, well, trust me, at the college I went to, if I had taken the math/science route, I would have been academically annihilated...I would have been lucky to make it out with a GPA higher than a 2.5 or so...I've always been good at the liberal arts, so, hey, that helped me get a great GPA at a great university...but what to do after that fact, that's still a mystery to me.

However, I am not trying to be a pessimist or whatever, I'm just being realistic...oh well, hope that my life doesn't turn into a boring cyclical workout, but about the best that I can do for myself after having gained all this collegiate know-how is to find a pretty good sales job, like at a car rental place or something along those lines.

Not really looking for opinions or help, just offering a perspective of a college kid coming out into this economy with a humanities past.
 
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I'm really looking forwards to landing myself a job in the area I just finished studying for! Never thought I'd say that.
 
Good luck, soul mate!

omnipresenthuman said:
I'm still looking for work currently...I'm graduating in December with a BA in humanities from a well respected university, don't plan on giving any names, but, nevertheless...I've had a very light schedule recently (just a few hours to finish up) and have looked into the market somewhat but I am at a bit of a loss for where to go, exactly. I'm definitely not the 'corporate' type and have no real desire to go into academia or teaching, although both of those professions would go well with my humanities education, in a way. Not really desiring to return to being a waiter or getting into a 8/10 dollar an hour job situation, but, well, like I said, I'm not really sure where to go with my education at the moment. I have next to no technical training, just countless hours spent on writing and academic research under my belt which essentially equals little to no pragmatic, real world, value. Unless I improve drastically in my corporate interviewing skills in the next year, I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I'll probably be working for a time in the type of jobs that I've been dealing with all throughout college, i.e., relatively unskilled work that pays near or only a bit more than minimum wage. Sorry to say, but purely humanities-related degrees are seeming, at least to me, to be increasingly unnecessary in a world run on abstract figures and advanced scientific technological know how.

If you're asking why I would say that now and have gone through the process of having achieved a humanities B.A. in the first place, well, trust me, at the college I went to, if I had taken the math/science route, I would have been academically annihilated...I would have been lucky to make it out with a GPA higher than a 2.5 or so...I've always been good at the liberal arts, so, hey, that helped me get a great GPA at a great university...but what to do after that fact, that's still a mystery to me.

However, I am not trying to be a pessimist or whatever, I'm just being realistic...oh well, hope that my life doesn't turn into a boring cyclical workout, but about the best that I can do for myself after having gained all this collegiate know-how is to find a pretty good sales job, like at a car rental place or something along those lines.

Not really looking for opinions or help, just offering a perspective of a college kid coming out into this economy with a humanities past.
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Here's the thing, employers don't care about G.P.A. They care about qualifications and experience. G.P.A. only matters when applying to college and grad school. You seem like you majored in humanities because it was easier to you, not because you actually had an idea of what you wanted to do as a career. Correct me if I'm wrong.

From what I know, humanities majors go into education a lot of the time, so you not wanting to do that is a bit interesting. It's all good, though. Have you considered perhaps working in a museum or something like that? Just a shot in the dark.

In the meanwhile, you'll probably have to keep working $8-10/hour jobs. See it as a temporary means to something better. It'll pad your resume so employers can see you are functional and are able to interact with people, something that a degree doesn't guarantee.

I hope you figure something out very soon!
 
Tude said:
Good luck, soul mate!
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Thanks, mate...I hope I don't need it(the luck, that is), but in this day and age it can be hard to get a job that one enjoys. I absolutely refuse to work in a job that does not interest me. The mining industry is for me; I like getting dirty, working hard with a team of solid people, having challenges (such as rocks falling out of the roof in tunnels), I have some experience in first aid (having put people in the recovery position several times when they have "passed out") so I like having that option to help if I need to, I love searching for expensive gems and ore, and the industry is just for me.

I would love to find (and I won't budge on this one bit) a job overseas, and first off I want to do some not-for-profit stuff to give back to society in a positive way - for so long I did things that were against my nature when I was dependent on substances...so I feel the need to do something good for humanity. Right now I'm looking at positions in developing countries, although it seems that I may begin my career in Sweden as my partner has invited me to go with her when she returns in the coming months.

Not sure where it will be that I begin my career, so to speak, but your well wishes are very much appreciated :)
 
The mining industry? That's so cool! Sounds like a perfect fit for you. Just stay safe.
 
overseas, nonprofit mining.

your GPA matters for a single, fat second. on top of the monotonous job where you prove you can show up to work without being a pain and learn some basics -- like CRM software, team-based work, phone & email etiquette, fucking office phones -- use your degree to get an internship or volunteer in a skill/education based position. because moving forward certainly will require specific skill sets demonstrated through workplace experience.
 
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My first day at my new job without a trainer went swimmingly! I will be working thirty-one hours next week, plus the forty I get at my old job :D
 
I'm working outdoors now. I love being outside!
 
i was a seasonal runner for UPS during undergrad. fucking loved it. outside, running all day. and my driver listened to classic rock, which isn't horrible. only thing that sucked was when it snowed.

the job i have now is much more stressful. but that comes with some weird perks (in addition to salary and benefits). like today i got a christmas gift from our design vendor. the gift is just candles, but it's weird to have people sucking up to you. really weird. and when shit's just paid for? like outside training and networking events. after exchanging business cards i wanna say, "holyfuck, do you all realize we are eating a $20 lunch after receiving $200 training? because our organizations think we're worth it!" quite different than paying for cafeteria food in college.

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oh, and everything is open bar. but when it's our event, i turn down drinks all night. i know what the liquor cost is, and it comes out of my budget.
 
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Hm.. question.

In the past, I've had experiences where I put an ungodly amount of time and energy into a personal project. Like the time I developed a program for Mac OS X from scratch, or the time I repaired/refurbished an old digital piano, etc. But there was a certain effortlessness in these projects; my heart was in the work.

On the other hand, the kind of work I do for money right now is completely different. I feel like I have to force myself to do the work, and I dread every minute I have to spend on it, instead of everything flowing naturally like it did for some of the personal projects I mentioned. It's like I'm constantly fighting a war in my head, and one side says WORK DAMMIT YOU NEED TO EAT, but the other says FUCK IT I'D RATHER DIE.

I feel like I need to merge those two ideas together, where I make money doing work that comes easily and painlessly. Is that a pipe dream?
 
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