For background on this topic without getting too specific, I’m an engineer and I typically work in an office. I’m younger and haven’t been in the work force for long but working in office spaces is driving me insane.
Now I understand that work isn’t supposed to be super fun, but I’d like to at least be able to tolerate it. So far I’ve spent a couple years in offices and it’s been miserable. I enjoy what I do as far as engineering. I like the topics, I like the productive parts of what I do. But I cannot stand office spaces. They’re uncomfortable and depressing environments for me.
I feel like spending time working from home would be ideal, but I’d like to hear people’s thoughts and if anyone else has had this experience. Is it something you just get used to?
Why shouldn’t work be fun? Why is there an expectation of misery in exchange for living?
I’m not saying it can’t be, but work usually isn’t “fun” or entertaining or whatever. I’m not saying it should or needs to be painful, just at least neutral or somewhat fulfilling in my life. I want to not hate it basically.
Of course work is miserable. If it was fun happy rainbow puppies all day, we wouldn’t call it “work”, we’d call it a “pastime” or a “hobby” Demand for that kind of “job” would be through the roof. There’d be waiting lists on applications and the wages would be near-nonexistent.
We get paid to do it because it sucks. Maybe not all of it sucks, but enough of it sucks that nobody wants to do it for free, for the love of the craft, for the personal betterment, or whatever.
Even people who work at the circus don’t say “Bye, honey, I’m off to spend the day at the circus!”, they say “Bye honey, I’m off to work.”
…or maybe “don’t work a job you don’t love!” is some white-collar thinking that I’m too blue-collar to understand.
Nah man. There’s nothing inherently shitty about work. Work is energy put to use. My garden is work. Painting the house is work. And my job, which is growing food, is work. And I really like my job. I like being outside, I like solving problems, interacting with plants and animals. The hours can be intense at times, and I’ve currently got blisters on the palms of my fucking hands, and I make very little money, but it is work and it is not shitty.
The problem is not that work sucks, the problem is that the types of work and the environments in which work is done in our industrialized, financialized, capitalist society are often alienating, dehumanzing, useless, destructive, boring, and pointless.
People finding work “miserable” is not an inherent property of work (which is doing something useful) or even of jobs (which is doing something supposedly useful for money). It’s an indication that something has gone wrong with our society.