[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Bill H. *
**jayjay wrote
So us Type ‘B’ personalities will purchase our lottery tix in Canada where lottery swag is not taxed. Besides, sloth requires but a modest income. The charge account at “DVD Slut” is usually the biggest part of the budget.
I guess this says something about the kind of job you have, i.e., one where you really feel you’re making a difference. I can’t say I’ve ever experienced that. I can’t count the times that I worked overtime, went above the call of duty, went out on my own initiative to find a better way to do something - but it all simply disappeared in the cloud of smoke produced by those above who simply didn’t have a clue. Anyone who used to work for my company would tell you that the downhill slide that culminated in going out of business started years ago, and it was a simple revolving door of incompetent CEO’s (five in the last four years), along with equally misguided middle-management, who never caught on that lofty, idealistic speeches about how we had a mission statement to be the most admired company in our industry didn’t matter if the product couldn’t be delivered. No one hesitated to cut an important project I was a part of halfway through, because eliminating it would free up $10K to put back in the budget - never mind that successful impletmentation would have added ten times that back in the first year. If I were a surgeon, or somehow otherwise held a job that actually made a difference, I’m sure my attitude would change accordingly. I don’t think the majority of people can claim to feel such empowerment, though. I too would like to believe that the world is a better place because I’m in it, but that’s because of the elements of my “real” life, not because of my job.
Me too, in the sense that my work is key to caring for my family. That’s why I keep working. That’s why I get up every day and do things I’d rather not do instead of taking off on my own. Believe me, I could live a free and easy life cheaply by myself (as I’m sure could my partner), but there is little that I take more seriously than my duty to provide for those who depend on me. I would do anything it takes to take care of the ones I love, even if it meant working three jobs at once (something I have done).
Once again, I can only say that you don’t work for the company I did, or for the company that most people I know work for. A huge number of people would find this sort of optimistic assertation laughable if not so painful. If working harder made more jobs, lots of us would still be employed. The harder I worked (and I did work harder, as increasing numbers of people were laid off and their work re-distributed), the worse the company as a whole did - what I was doing just didn’t matter in the overall state of the company.
I’m not out to give Bill H. a hard time - nothing personal, and I wish you continued success and happiness at work -just trying to point out that there may be a valid reason that not everyone shares his attitude.
Wow, Bill, I must say your message has unnerved me. I’m truly not being sarcastic when I say that I had no idea that coming in every day and doing your job without any thought of some day climbing the ranks was no longer sufficient. I hope you do find the interview question that would help you to weed me out, for both our sakes.
I have no desire to be a burden to my employer. You seem to be saying that I am doing so by not having any ambition other than doing a decent job with the job I have. Believe me, I would LOVE to have a job I enjoy. I thought I scored with my current one simply because I don’t dread going in there. I have given up, however, on the idea of ever having a job I love, that I really care about.
Is it really true that doing what needs to be done and not caring if you go any further is somehow hindering a business and, ultimately, the economy? From your “weed-out” stance, it seems like you feel that the majority of workers truly do care about the company for which they work and truly do take a personal interest in their job, with only a few people like myself counting the minutes until they can go home. Personally, I don’t feel that’s true, I feel that many people are at least willing to pretend to their bosses that they are deeply concerned with the Q3 budget statements, but don’t really give a damn. I don’t know. I did mention in the OP that I feel like a freak for not caring about my job, but I should say that’s as opposed to pretending like I care about it, rather than actually caring about it. Now I feel like even more of a freak, if what you’re saying is true.
And trust me, I don’t revel in my job apathy. It is not pleasant, in a country where one is judged by his or her profession, to be asked what my job is and not have an answer most people would find reasonable. It’s embarassing to know that even though I’m satisfied with the salary I’m making, most people would consider it insulting. As I said, I would love to have a job I really do care about - I’d take it in a heartbeat. But I never have, and I don’t know what it might be. I really can’t think of the task I would rather do for most of my waking hours than be with my friends and family and do the things I do enjoy (none of which anyone would pay me for).
BTW, I have to say that if I had my house paid for and no other outstanding debts, I would have no trouble living on $20K/year.
Electric: max of 150/mo (no gas or water bills here)
Car insurance: $500/yr
20000-2300=$17700/yr, certainly more than enough to take care of my modest wishes (a trip to the beach once a year, perhaps) and daily expenses (groceries, car repairs, aspirin, library fines) if I own my house outright. I know for a fact that my retired parents are living comfortably on less than this, since they paid off their house years ago. Living large isn’t a reqirement for me - I’m happy to live small, and believe I could do so happily with a mil (even after taxes).
Absolutely. First of all, while a house may be nice to own, I just can’t get my mind to happily acquiesce to paying two to three times what the place is worth in interest and finance charges. Being taught the intricacies of a mortgage in my “Life Preparation” classes in high school turned me off of property ownership.
Second, my most expensive vice is (outside of cigarettes), computer parts, upgrades and software. I don’t skydive, waterski, spelunk, scuba dive, race motorcycles, cars or boats, do land/home speculation, or collect gemstones. I don’t need >$50,000/year to live comfortably. I have no wide-ranging ambitions to travel the world, cruise the oceans, or get into hobby aviation. I have no family to support, and quite probably never will. I’m not personally particularly impressed with wealth in general, nor do I find people who are to be attractive, so I don’t need to be wealthy to find friends or lovers. I don’t even care if I “keep up with the Joneses”.
All I really need in life is enough money to cover rent, gasoline, utilities, cigarettes, food and (modest)entertainment, with enough left over to put in the bank for emergencies.
jayjay
I’ll step out on the thin ice* here and go with what Bill H. has been saying. A few things to clarify:
[li] If you hate your job so much that it quells any sort of ambition or (more importantly) aspirations that you might have; Get another frickin’ job! Life is way too short to spend eight hours in agony every day. Your job should be something that brings at least a modicum of self-realization to your life. If not, you are merely swallowing a dram of cumulative poison each day.[/li]
[li] I work to live, I do not live to work. Yet, I must say that if you are entirely without ambition it is hard to believe that you will manage to have other important aspirations in life. Your job should reflect some of your more important life choices. If you are able to submit yourself to some form of slow torture for eight hours each day, what does this say about your selection of life styles?[/li]
[li] I have done my best to select a job that centers upon some sort of central fascination in my life (in this case semiconductor fabrication). I do this because it provides an irreplaceable sense of enthusiasm about my job. If I stumble across a relevant article in Science News, The Industrial Physicist or NASA Tech Briefs, you bet I take the article to work and circulate it. My company stock might increase in value because of one of these contributions. I certainly don’t see how such efforts can do any harm. This is merely one component of ambition.[/li]
[li] Ambition manifests in many ways. It does not mandate a climb up the corporate ladder, but more often than not it will result in something of that sort. To lead by example and to take initiative (evidently foreign concepts to some here) expand not only your own horizons but also increase your chances for advancement. If your are entirely satisfied with whatever money your are earning right now, fine, feel free to keep earning that wage for years to come. This is where lack of initiative comes back to incise the buttocks of those who maintain it. I do not gauge my entire life by the money I make, but I certainly do intend to increase my earning power in order to better provide for the dreams that I have for the future.[/li]
[li] If you have no dreams for the future and couldn’t possibly imagine what you might do with some extra income, then far be it from me to suggest that you modify your attitude. I find it extremely difficult to believe that any of you who have chimed in about your lack of motivation at the workplace haven’t also looked at the bottom line of your paychecks and grumbled more than once or twice. Your possible grumbling and lack of ambition are at complete odds with each other. This selfsame dichotomy quite possibly provides for the void that gapes between your job and personal life.[/li]
[li] In short, you may find that your dreams and ambitions are inextricably intertwined (I believe that they are). Abandon one and you surrender the other. Stasis is stagnation. If you are unwilling to challenge yourself on a routine basis, then welcome to the world of wage slavery.[/li]Besides, the only nice thing about apathy is that you don’t have to commit yourself to it.
cygnus wrote
Legomancer wrote
Your life is your own. If you are not happy in your life, you must change that. I’m sure the steps are obvious, but I’ll enumerate:
a) identify work that would excite or at least interest you
b) plan a path to that goal
c) recognize that the process may take a long time, perhaps many years
d) do it
You may think there is no time for this, but think about it. Weigh it against your current choice of spending 8+ hours a day doing something you hate. You are where you are by choice, and you can leave it by choice. Don’t choose to be unhappy.
If, as you say, you don’t feel your work is adding value to the world, you are choosing to be useless (by your own words). Don’t choose to be useless.
It can (and probably will) take some hard work. Give yourself a kick in the butt and make it happen.
Sorry for the preaching, but if you honestly want it to be better than it falls on you to fix it.
Bill H., I respect your attitude about your job, because it does seem to serve both you and your employer very well. However, as one of the self-proclaimer apathetic people, I wanted to stress that I don’t hate my job. I’m not miserable when I’m there. It’s a very nice job, and I believe I do a good job. My employer also seems to think so, as far as I can tell in light of my income and position.
Yet my job is not my passion. I don’t aspire to having a role with more responsibility, because that would most likely require more work, thus meaning more time, hence less time for the things I am very passionate about – my family and other non-job activities. If someone offered me a promotion, with the understanding that I would also need to work one weekend per month, I would turn it down in a New York minute.
I work with a woman who is passionate about the creepy art of puppet-making (NB: I call it creepy, she doesn’t). She likes having a nine to five job that allows her to spend her weekends and evenings with the scary puppets. At one point in her life, she worked for Disney, making puppets. She quit that job after about a year, because she didn’t like having her artistic life caught up in her paycheck. It was turning a love into a responsibility. It took a lot of the fun out of it for her.
I think for some people, having a job that overlaps with one’s passions is a good thing. For others, there is another model, and it doesn’t make them less valuable members of the work force. I’m not talking about people who suck up company time making personal calls and generally slacking off, but rather people who put in a quality performance during the work day, and then promptly go home and don’t give another moment of thought to their job until the next time they are at their desk.
I guess what bothers me is that there seem to be a lot of people (at least where I work) who are doing a ridiculous amount of “extra work” that is, in essence, spinning their wheels. I don’t think you, Bill, are one of those people, by the way. But my workplace is full of people who brag about things like missing their child’s school play because they were putting in overtime on a work project. And believe me, the quality of that work is no better than the person who did leave half an hour early to see their daughter’s little league championship game. If they would all stop talking about all the extra work they so willingly do they could both a. get more actual work done and b. get home at a decent hour. I realize this is more of a rant about my particular place of employment than it is about work trends in general, but it boggles my mind.
One thing I should point out. I don’t hat emy job. I hated my previous job, this one is much better. I just don’t LOVE it. And I can’t think of any job on the planet that would make me cheer every morning because I would go to it.
My job isn’t agony and torment. It’s my job. It’s what I do for money. I go there, I do it, I come home. I don’t dread the 8 hours a day I spend there, but I’m not looking to increase it to 9. I don’t think about it at all once I’ve left. I don’t read trade magazines that talk about it and I don’t do anything at home that relates to it.
I kind of look at it as taking a dump. Do I love doing that? No, but I like it better than the alternative. Do I regret the time spent doing it? No, but I’m not looking to increase it. It’s a necessary evil, and nothing more.
Trust me, in my last job, which I hated, I had a lot of time to think about what I wanted to do and how to accomplish it. And what I came up with was that there really wasn’t any job I wanted to do. The things I’m interested in are things no one will pay me for. I don’t have many useful skills that many other people don’t also have. So the best I’m going to do is a job I can stand to do for 8 hours a day at a wage I can live on. And like many others, I can do just fine on a low salary; I don’t have expensive tastes.
Ah, but that’s the point - I’m extremely happy in my life! I have a rich and loving relationship, good family relations, a home that is paradise to me, and every material thing I really want. I savor each and every day and only wish there were more hours in it. I just wish I didn’t have to waste those nine hours a day at work instead of enjoying the life I love.
I have done work that interests me - I didn’t mean to imply that I hated every second I ever spent at work, or that I have only had horrible jobs. I have had some very good jobs indeed, and there have been times that I was genuinely enthused about some particular thing I was working on. But that still didn’t mean that I cared about it in any meaningful way - if the entire company had been whisked away on alien saucers overnight, I would only have shrugged, not mourned for my lost project.
As for planning a goal and spending years recognizing it – again, that’s the point: there is absolutely nothing related to work in any field about which I feel such a desire. The only subject about which I can claim to feel such passion is my real life - what I do outside the office. And as others have said, nobody is going to pay me to spend time with my mate, or to read, or to work on my house.
I think that many people, even if they love their job, have legitimate doubts about how much real value they are adding to the world. In my last job, performing my duties meant that I contributed, in a small and invisible way, to getting our company’s product onto store shelves. I also maintained our computer sales reporting system so as to keep valid data available for regional sales managers, issued payments to vendors for various programs, processed incoming EDI files, and did a hundred other little things every day. Did they matter to the company? Sure, that’s why they paid me, and I never considered myself useless. But do I feel I was actually adding value to the world? Of course not. After all, all it really amounted to was getting a product to customers and making a profit for the corporation, and, while that can be called useful, I can’t construe it as contributing significantly to the world. Unlike the surgeon or the peace negotiator, most of us are not going to end up doing anything of genuine importance at work. Furthermore, in all but the smallest organizations, every operation is so multi-layered, and any individual so many steps removed from the end result, that our contributions are distinctly intangible on a daily basis.
Legomancer - yeah, I second all that. I always explain that my job is what I do in order to provide myself with the means to live as I please during the remaining hours of the week. Effective analogy, BTW. 
I work part time from home as a mainframe programmer, and I still don’t like what I do…but I wouldn’t dream of quitting before I can support myself with my writing full time. I’m lacking in ambition, but I don’t actually hate my job. I don’t even hate what I do. I just don’t like it. I, too hate the “Where would you like to be in xx years.” The last time a manager asked me that, I said, “Published.” When he asked where I’d like to be in the company in five years, I said I just want to do what I’m doing.
I get paid hourly now, which I love. As I told him, that means I don’t have to worry about working overtime. I don’t mind being on call even if it means 3:00 a.m. phone calls, as long as it isn’t all the time. I hated being salaried because it meant no overtime pay. Now, I can just take off another day instead.
P.S. Legomancer, you get cooler with every post I’ve read of yours.
I’m sorry but I think I will discard. You seem to be a minority, nice boss kind of person who doesn’t see or perhaps doesn’t have to deal with all the corporate bullcrap thrown around. I totally agree with your statement “if you honestly want it to be better than it falls on you to fix it”. Nothing annoys me more than the person who complains about their job and so gives lackluster performance, because it makes my job harder.
What I DON’T agree with is the “giving 110%” that they try to extract from you. And yes, it is much like an extraction. I wish I were that 9-5 one hour lunch person who takes all their personal/sick/vacation days without guilt. However, being salaried, ‘you stay till the work is done’.
So then you make the choice: to stay and get it finished so you can get your measly 3-4% raise next year and feel guilty about seeing less of your family. Or you can go home and spend the time with your family, (Hoping there isn’t some nazi backstabber at work with their hand on a piece of chalk ready to put a mark next to your name every time you: have a dentist appt/work from home/miss a deadline because of someone else’s ineptness.)
What some people are failing to see is that all of these apathetic people didn’t start out that way. They were excited to get their first job, wanted to learn and then slowly over the years got sucked dry by the 110% mentality. The workhard-getahead idea is myth. It’s more like: jump-from-job-to-job-or-suck-up-and-get-ahead.
For me, I think its sad that my wake up call was 9/11. Most of the time spent walking uptown I was thinking “I don’t care about work, so if they want to fire me, then fire me. I don’t care. I want more time with my kids anyway. At least they appreciate it.”
(note: My job itself I like, I dislike intensely the culture that often comes with it.)
This is absolutely true. I loved my real first job. I got to wear a suit. Travel around to clients. Have meetings. Just like a real job!
That joy lasted about six months.
I was ambitious. I was willing to work hard and put in the extra effort. I used to believe in staying until the job is done and I derived satisfaction from doing a good job. And yet every company managed to suck that desire out of me.
All it takes is to have some idiot manager who don’t know what she is doing or be constantly berated for working 10 hours instead of 11 or 12 hours instead of 13 or chastised for leaving at 6:00pm because you’ve been sitting around all day waiting for a manager who never showed up or having to listen to some moron coworker who really buys into the corporate bullshit instead of recognizing that the rest of the world views it as a joke.
DeadlyAccurate - You aren’t lacking in ambition. Your ambition is to be a professional writer. It’s understandable that you would not achieve the same level of excitement working for someone elses dream.
I feel exactly like Legomancer.
I just try to do a good job and go home. I will do everything in my ability to make sure that my coworkers’ don’t suffer needlessly because of something I failed to do properly. But I’m not going to get all worked up over some impending crisis handed to us by the managers on high.
All of my ambition was beaten out of me long ago in the games of office politics.
I could very happily stay up until 3:00 a.m., sleep until 10:00 am, lounge around in my underwear and housecoat, play with my son, play on the computer, go to the park in the afternoon and have no responsibilities at all.
I do not need a career to define my worth for me. I am worthy already. I also don’t depend on the approval of others to make me feel like I have self worth.
Quite a few of the CEOs that I have seen are considered to be the top achievers in their chosen career paths. Quite a few of these top achievers are crooks, liars and quite willing to suck the soul out of any employee or investor that comes close to their company.
Let me see…do I want to be one of these guys or would I rather be flying a kite in the park with my son? Success is not defined by a job or career for me.
Legomancer, cygnus, et al., you are completely not alone. That is exactly how I feel about my job. It’s what I do to pay the bills. It’s not exciting, it’s not boring, it just is. Most of the people I work with are take-it-or-leave-it relationships about which I am largely ambivalent. I don’t care about the Machiavellian doings of others in the department, and I don’t care who had a baby or is getting married or whatever at any other location. I go in, I leave, I repeat. None of the work people know me outside the workplace, and none of my close outside friends know anything about the job. It’s just how I like it.
And Oreo, I feel you on the lunch thing. Lunch time is sitting-in-the-car-with-the-MP3-player-on time. I like the people I work with well enough, but 9 hours at a stretch would be too much.
Count me out of the grind too. What gets me is people who get into elaborate conspiracies and office politics for crappy jobs like retail. I’ve seen all these elaborate ploys go down for what is, essentially, a $10,000 a year job. I could understand if you were gonna be, like, CEO.
Welcome to my world.
A friend of mine from b-school sent me a story about a fisherman who meets a Harvard MBA. The MBA tells him he should work longer hours so he can make more money so he can buy another fishing boat so he can eventually get a fleet so he can eventually get big enough to take it public so he can eventually become a milionaire in 40 years.
“Why would I want to do all that?” the fisherman asks.
The MBA Says “So you can have free time to hang out and do what you like to do.”
The fisherman replies “I like to fish.”
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by msmith537 *
Welcome to my world.
Soon it will be mine, too. Today I gave my two week’s notice at work.
I don’t really like my job. It’s not terrible, the environment does not cause unnecessary stress for me, and I am treated with respect. Most importantly, I am compensated well. But I have spent the last three years (one year at this job, one each at two previous jobs) shuffling paper. And I have saved enough money that for the next few months, I won’t have to do it anymore.
Taking my daily poison pill had become so routine that the idea of leaving with no prospects for full-time employment afterwards really shocked me. I am supposed to work, I am expected to work, it’s what everyone else does.
But if I am only working for my paycheck and I no longer need said paycheck, the reason to work disappears.
Yeah, I’ll do some part-time over the summer and certainly once I start grad school in the fall. But for now, it will be books, beers, time with my friends, and being accountable to no one but myself.
I just left (okay, I was asked to leave) a job that I hated. I hated it because it had the kind of made up emergencies Delphica describes. Like, “we have to have this Wednesday!” when Thursday or even Monday would be just fine. Often the people pushing weren’t even the ones who originally asked for the thing, and those folks were sometimes surprised. (“Wow, you got it today? Thanks, but I really can’t look at it until next week…”)
All the same, I have had jobs I liked, and it’s a good feeling when I am working with a group of people I like on a project that is well-run. I work in IT, and typically my colleagues are people more or less like me, men and women I don’t mind having lunch with.
I would hate to be in a job where I felt overqualified and that everyone around me was “different” and somehow not worth socializing with. I’m sure it happens a lot, but hopefully mostly early in most people’s series of jobs. Speaking as an old man here, I think this improves as you get older.
Of course, the lousy economy isn’t helping. When no one wants to pay for better employees, there seems to be an abundance of people I wouldn’t eat with.