I'm Unhappy With Work

I’m unhappy, unhappy with work. Not my current job per se, but the concept of work in general. Of knowingly entering a contract where I exchange time and effort in order to sustain myself.

I shouldn’t be. Or at least I think I shouldn’t be. After all, work is inescapable and a de-facto requirement of life. And so I get the sense of it being an inherent personal “moral” failing to be so disillusioned so early into my working life (4 hours at the time of writing).

Its not even that I’d describe my current job as bad, in fact I’d say I did relatively well, given I was coming off of startup burnout. I have my complaints sure, but they’re all so non-specific that I’d struggle to see them being resolved by finding another job - and they all boil down to a lack of self-determination.

In theory, the payment should surely be a counterbalance to this, right? After all, without intrinsic motivation - then extrinsic motivation is required in the form of money, in order to keep oneself alive. But that only goes so far, working to live. Time is also money. And the lack of time has been far more demoralising than a lack of money, still having the experience of being a broke University student relatively fresh in my mind.

That has been personally shocking to me, and it led to a lot of thinking and introspection on why this would be the case. At university, I had both more time and more flexible hours, but I was broke and stressed often enough to think I was going grey for a few years. At my first startup, I had great control and involvement in developing a product and learning the software development ropes, but was still pretty broke, worked 60hr weeks on the regular and gave myself burnout. And yet… and yet… I’ve never felt so unhappy on a day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month rolling basis. Why?

I rattled around a few explanations but the most simple and straightforward to me is the lack of a clear goal, or direction. University was about obtaining a degree and the startup was about building a brand new business from scratch to fill a niche. My current corporate programmer job is to be one very small cog in one very big machine. A bit directionless, and significantly harder to extract any kind of self-worth from. The contrast has been stark.

Of course, life is not all about work - but it takes up a portion significant enough that finding deriving little-to-none self-worth is highly demoralising to me. By looking elsewhere to derive self-worth, through different projects that align with my personal hobbies - it has only increased my negativity towards work. Why let a significant amount of my personal time and effort go to “waste”? Why let myself become… alienated? ¹

I can only wonder what the future may hold. I am not one who jumps into uncertain situations lightly, but this has been stewing long enough. Over the past few months I have been spending some time looking into my own startup as well as ways of monetising my hobbies - not much yet but my goal of 2024 is to see if anything I produce and release can net me any kind of income at all, even £1/month. Fingers crossed.