The Way Forward

There’s a company by the name TNS, and they’re in what’s called “market information”. I read one of their surveys recently, about job satisfaction, and it turns out that 25% of all workers are “just showing up to collect a paycheck” and that 40% of workers feel “disconnected” from their employers, and a humungous 53% of workers responded with “neutral” or “dissatisfied” (or worse) responses for how they felt about their job. And the dissatisfaction is worse the lower the income falls.

Work. What is it, really? It’s waking up way before you really want to and, voluntarily, commuting through traffic to a place where you don’t feel valued, and where you don’t want to be. And then doing it again and again.

If you add up all the time it’s really insane. And I’m going to be nice and give you three weeks off a year. But you’re still working 8 hours a day. Forty hours a week. One thousand, nine hundred and sixty hours a year (that’s 81 days working around the clock, every year), or, if you retire at 65 after 44 years of work, that’s three thousand five hundred and ninety-three days. Or, to break it down for you, nine years, ten months and one day of doing nothing but something unfulfilling, that you hate, that makes you feel like less of the person you know you can be.

Now, I’m not a doctor, but I’ve seen one on TV, and I’d say that spending the better part of ten years doing something that destroys your soul sounds an awful lot like most people’s version of Hell.

The worst thing is that more than half of us are voluntarily consigning one seventh of our expected time on the planet to activities that reduce the time we’re likely to have. How do I know this?

The University of Aberdeen in Scotland told me so. According to economists there, job satisfaction is the most critical factor for life satisfaction and well-being. And the consequences of poor well-being have an impact on your physical well-being (according to the National Institutes of Health) and poor physical well-being is the thing that leads to cardio-vascular disorders. Not only that, but poor life-satisfaction leads to depression and anxiety, which are leading attractors to drugs (according to Narconon).

The abuse of socially acceptable drugs (booze and cigarettes) is more prevalent in lower-paid workers (less than median income), while increased addiction/dependency behaviors develop at disproportionately high rates compared to those workers in higher income brackets.

So what have we learned today?

If you’re at the bottom of the payscale, you’re more likely to be dissatisfied with your job. Your dissatisfaction is more likely to lead to cigarettes and booze (which you can’t really afford); and while your job dissatisfaction makes you more depressed, the pounds you pile on by comfort eating and not being able to exercise because the cigarettes have taken away your lung capacity, cause you to develop serious medical conditions that will put you in an early grave.

Isn't that nice?

But there’s an answer.

Stop now. Quit. FTW. Get out of the cube before it eats you alive.

Go home.

Figure out what you want to do, that doesn’t sound like Hell on earth, and do that.