I feel stuck at work. Help!
With advice from Chekhov, Paradise Lost, and Sheenagh Pugh
I feel stuck at work. Somehow I've lost that loving feel. Help!
Hello to my enigmatic correspondent! You haven’t given me much to go on here, but in the spirit of answering every letter I get, I’ll do my very best to help you regardless. (Incidentally, if anyone else is looking to submit a problem, you can do so here.)
The first comfort I want to offer you, my concise friend, is knowledge you are not alone. Everyone hates work. Recently, a global survey of employee wellbeing found that only 23% of workers feel engaged by their jobs. So, if you are torturing yourself with some kind of story in which your friends wake up bright-eyed, skipping toward their soul’s purpose and doing overtime for lols, it is simply not true.
Hating work is not a new thing, either. Your problem made me think of, well, all of Chekhov’s plays. EVERYONE hates work in Chekhov. It’s deliciously millennial. Chekhov plays are like a giant version of that Kermit meme that says ‘When your alarm goes off and you have to go to work because you didn’t die in your sleep’. His characters hate being doctors, they hate being teachers, they hate working for the government, they even - shock horror - hate being writers. In The Seagull, renowned author Trigorin tells bright-eyed Nina just how much he despises it: ‘The best years of my youth were made one continual agony for me by my writing.’ And even when the writing’s done, he isn’t happy:
‘No sooner does a book leave the press than it becomes odious to me; it is not what I meant it to be; I made a mistake to write it at all; I am provoked and discouraged. Then the public reads it and says: ‘Yes, it is clever and pretty, but not nearly as good as Tolstoy’.
Even people who have supposedly followed their passion are having a terrible time - maybe more so, because everyone assumes they’re living in bliss. How do I feel about writing, you ask? Look, I’m very lucky to do it, writing is super, don’t @ me. But I’d still choose being at the pub with my friends 99 times out of 100.
I am not trying to make you miserable - I am going for a ‘misery loves company’ angle; I hope it’s working. And I do think Chekhov’s plays teach us something important about why we feel stuck at work. In The Three Sisters, the youngest of the trio, Irina, starts the play fantasising about the fulfilment work will bring: ‘A man ought to work, to toil in the sweat of his brow, and all the purpose and meaning of his life, his happiness, his ecstasies lie in that alone. How delightful to be a workman who gets up before dawn and breaks stones on the road, or a shepherd, or a schoolmaster!’ But when Irina finds a job as a telegraph clerk, it doesn’t suit: ‘What I so longed for, what I dreamed of is the very thing it's lacking in’. She finds a different job in the town council, and hates that too: ‘I'm already twenty-three, I've been working for years, my brains are drying up, I'm getting thin and old and ugly and there's nothing, nothing, not the slightest satisfaction’.
The reality of daily toil fails to live up to Irina’s grand hopes of spiritual transformation via labour. But we get the sense nothing could have satisfied her, when her expectations were so high. The point I’m driving toward is that your enjoyment of almost anything is often to do with your mindset. Sometimes, a lot of the time, your relationship with work is more about your relationship with yourself. I wouldn’t be surprised if that 23% of engaged workers from the survey weren’t in stereotypically fulfilling jobs - they were just those lucky few blessed with a happy disposition.
So, this is my first piece of advice: can you do some soul-searching, and figure out if the problem really is the work, or if the dissatisfaction is a more fundamental part of you? If you are easily bored, often anxious, or have staggeringly high expectations of life, then changing your work might not help all that much. (I hope you don’t feel targeted; all those things are true of me.)
If this is a ‘you’ problem, you have two choices. You can deal with it like a Chekhov character would: you can grumble, you can gossip, you can drink; you can pass time falling in love with the wrong person, you can share memes about hating your life. There’s no shame in this; these are tried-and-tested coping strategies. Or: you can do the phenomenally hard (but possible) work of rewiring your brain. I mean meditation, gratitude, journalling, all of it. You don’t need me to tell you how to do this - there are plenty books on the topic. But if you do decide to go down this route, I will leave you with my favourite line from Paradise Lost to repeat like a mantra at taxing moments:
The mind is its own place, and in itself / can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
There is such terror for me in this: the power of the mind to torture us. Yet there is such strength in it, too. Inside your beautiful brain lies the power to create a heaven.
I’m not one of those mad people who thinks mindset is the only factor in happiness, though. You have to be wildly privileged or an actual monk to think that. The fact is, external factors do play a part in joy. And as you say you once had a ‘loving feel’ at work, it may be that it is truly the job itself which no longer satisfies you. Perhaps you have outgrown it - perhaps you secretly harbour dreams of doing something else.
In that case, you already know what you should do. You just need to find the resolve. Because feeling ‘stuck’ in our comfy Western world (I’m making assumptions here based on my reader demographic; please do write in if I’m wrong) often just means feeling afraid. I doubt you are truly, immovably stuck. But change is scary: it opens up a wide vista of unpredictability that our existing choices protect us from.
In these terrifying moments, when I am dipping my toe into a great black ocean of uncertainty, I run a thought experiment. If I was given the fairy-tale power to see the rest of my life play out before my eyes - would I take it? The answer, of course, is no. We don’t really want to know what our future holds, even if we think we do. Unpredictability is the great thrill of life. So be brave. If a tingly voice inside is telling you to quit your job, quit it, and go and seek that loving feel somewhere else.
I leave you with my favourite poem by Sheenagh Pugh on facing the unknown. It makes me feel like I could do anything. I hope you like it.
What If This Road
What if this road, that has held no surprises
these many years, decided not to go
home after all; what if it could turn
left or right with no more ado
than a kite-tail? What if its tarry skin
were like a long, supple bolt of cloth,
that is shaken and rolled out, and takes
a new shape from the contours beneath?
And if it chose to lay itself down
in a new way, around a blind corner,
across hills you must climb without knowing
what’s on the other side, who would not hanker
to be going, at all risks? Who wants to know
a story’s end, or where a road will go?
And, if you’d like some further reading about job satisfaction (or lack of it), this week I loved
’s outstanding piece on burn-out at work, which you can read here. What a brilliant writer she is, with an important message too.
"Inside your beautiful brain lies the power to create a heaven" should be emblazoned on a t-shirt.
Thank you Emma