Work sucks (pass it on)

"Sometimes, you win the life lottery and the thing that you do for 40 hours a week in a nondescript office building somewhere in the city you live in is not a soul-crushing exercise in managing disappointments. Sometimes, you're lucky enough to really, truly, love what you do. If you are one of these people, I'm very happy for you. . . ."

-- Megan Reynolds, introducing her new every-
Monday column on work issues on "The Frisky"

by Ken

As I mentioned last night, I was putting off a post on the lines of "Work sucks" in order to deal ("Let's celebrate that great champion of the American working man, mining mogul Donny "Safety Is for Suckers" Blankenship") with Nobody's Favorite Employer, finally indicted Massey Energy head honcho Donny Blankenship, who is accused of contributing generously, via his consistent record of thumbing his nose at mine safety considerations (including voluminous citations for violations), to the April 2010 Upper Branch Mine disaster, which took the lives of 29 of his employees.

You have to wonder what goes through the mind of someone like Donny B, known (per Rolling Stone) as the "Dark Lord" of Coal Country, when he thinks of the miners whose lives are in his hands. Surely he does think of them, at least in some fashion, but it can't be as human persons subjecting themselves to inhuman conditions for the sake of putting food on their family's tables, can it? It has to be as some kind of automaton, easily replaceable with other readily available units. My wonder is whether his views on mine safety issues might change if he spent, say, a month doing regular shifts in one of his mines.

(Actually, I like better still the suggestion of a commenter on last night's post: "The sentence Blankenship SHOULD get would be to spend the rest of his life tearing coal out of the ground in the very conditions he deems suitable for employment.")

What I had in mind was a hangover from the debut Monday of a column devoted to work issues on on "The Frisky" called "Make It Work." Author Megan Reynolds got the venture off to a frothy start:

Newsflash. Work is terrible. It’s something that we all have to do, but no one particularly wants to do it. It’s a cruel trick in which you have to go to a place and do things that you would never normally do, for a nominal amount of money that is usually too little, and for a select few, just right. Sometimes, you win the life lottery and the thing that you do for 40 hours a week in a nondescript office building somewhere in the city you live in is not a soul-crushing exercise in managing disappointments. Sometimes, you’re lucky enough to really, truly, love what you do. If you are one of these people, I’m very happy for you. Please close this tab and go to that special members-only club that exists for people who have found true career satisfaction. Let me know what it’s like in there.

Like Megan I've known or at least heard about people who truly love what they do to make a living, and like Megan I'm happy for them. Okay, I hate them, but that doesn't mean I'm not happy for them. Actually, I haven't really personally known all that many of them, so the problem hasn't come up all that much.

For the debut column Megan looked an extreme version of the problem faced by most of us ("career dissatisfaction is as natural as breathing"): "How to Tell if You're in the Wrong Job." She ventures that "there’s a fine line that separates general career dissatisfaction and actually being in the wrong career," and tells us she has "worked a lot of the wrong jobs" but has "finally found something that's kind of right." Hence, she says, "I know what I'm talking about."

She proceeds to throw out "some signs that you might be doing the wrong job." I don't want to steal her thunder, and will encourage you to go onsite for proper explanations of her four "signs":

1. You don’t feel like you’re very good at your job.
2. The thought of advancing in your field makes you want to die, a little.
3. You’re actually never happy at work. Ever.
4. You actually aren’t ever motivated to just sit down and, you know, work.

This last sign is interesting. After describing this particular state of occupational desolation, Megan says:

[I]f you’re truly, and actually dissatisfied with your job or the direction your career has taken to this point, the idea of sitting down and doing even the simplest, least painful task that is in your work repertoire is impossible to fathom. I like to believe that all human beings WANT to work in some way, because work makes you feel useful, and feeling useful makes you feel like a functioning member of society. If you can’t even be driven to try to perform these very basic tasks, here’s what you need to do: Take a “mental health day,” and sit in your empty home. Take a shower, make some coffee, and find a fresh Sharpie and a legal pad. Make a list of all the things you want out of your career. Shut off the horrible, screaming voice in your head that’s telling you that you’re just having a bad day. Respect yourself enough to make the list honestly. Stick the list up on a wall, Carrie Mathison-style, and step back. If there’s nothing on that list that matches what you’re currently doing, guess what? It’s time to make a change.

And Megan promises "more on that in a future column." I don't know whether that's going to be the subject of column no. 2, on Monday, but in any case it seems worth checking out.

#