What To Do If You Hate Your Job, or Even Just Sorta Don't Enjoy It Very Much

Some humble advice for minimizing the bad and maximizing the good

After my essay on The Tartar Steppe, I had a long conversation with someone about how to avoid being Drogo (read the essay), or in other words, what do you do if you hate your job. On one hand, I am not sure I’m qualified to answer that. On the other hand, I feel like I can answer it, qualifications be damned. So I decided to just give the advice to a younger version of myself. Gordian Knot, cut.

Early in my career, fresh out of college, I had a job I hated. I liked the people I worked with, but I hated the work. It wasn’t interesting and I didn’t feel like I was growing personally or professionally. I was convinced I’d backed myself into a corner and my life had stalled at age 23. I applied for dozens and dozens of jobs, usually receiving no reply. One response I did receive, and will never forget, was from an editor at a major metro paper that I won’t name (it was in Cleveland, so you can connect the dots). He told me, in so many words, that the industry was fucked and so was I. But I wasn’t financially stable enough to just quit with nothing else lined up, and I was left feeling, well, fucked, as I had to continue working there while I looked for a new gig (which we all know is not always simple or easy to do).

I was not psychologically equipped to deal with this situation very well. I was sad a lot. I was moody. I didn’t have much motivation to do anything but sit at home. Eventually, I did find a new job, the one I have now at TPM, and I’m very fortunate. But I know what it’s like to feel doom every Sunday night, and hopelessness that arises every time you fire off another job application and get no response. And I’m aware that my situation at its worst still wasn’t that bad in the big scheme of things.

I think we all have three basic psychological needs¹:

1. Autonomy, or the need to self-regulate one’s experiences and actions

2. Competence, which is our need to feel effective and to master skills

3. Relatedness, the need to feel socially connected

If I could go back and handle things differently when I was stuck in a job I hated, I would try to find situations that support and satisfy these needs rather than chasing wealth and status. Of course, you need money to do things, but there are diminishing returns. Without further ado, here’s the advice I wish I could’ve given to my younger self. 

1. Try to find and focus on the aspects of your job that make you feel good.²

The first job I ever had was making pizzas. It was a good first job, all things considered. I learned basic kitchen skills, and my boss was this maniac from Italy who my dad knew (and who I actually keep in touch with to this day). But it was still a job and at 14 years old, I wasn’t keen on working at all. 

But I did like having money. I liked being able to do things and to buy things. The freedom that I was afforded by virtue of having money made it worth it most of the time. I’ve written before about intrinsic goals and extrinsic goals, and how extrinsic goals such as wealth and status generally are not associated with well-being. But, according to psychologists Dr. Richard Ryan and Dr. Edward Deci, there is evidence that when the pursuit of extrinsic goals are being done for more “admirable reasons such as family support, charitable contributions, and experiencing personal freedom, the pursuit may have positive rather than negative consequences.” This concept is called the virtuous pursuit of extrinsic goals, and it hints at the importance of how and why goals are set. I wasn’t working at the pizza place trying to better myself or become a master chef, I was looking for more freedom, and having that made the job tolerable, even enjoyable. 

Of course, as a 14-year old kid, making minimum wage was a helluva comeuppance. This principle may not be in play for you, but the point is to really interrogate what you are trying to get out of a job and put the work in that context. It may not be ideal to have a job that’s mostly transactional, unless the true aim of that transactional relationship is to have more autonomy outside the workplace. This, in turn, allows you to better satisfy the needs of competence and relatedness, and it may improve well-being. The danger is when you start chasing wealth or status simply for the sake of wealth or status, because there are diminishing returns.

There was another aspect of making pizzas that I liked, and I imagine it’s why so many people enter a professional kitchen and never leave: The rushes. On a Sunday around noon in the fall, we’d get slammed. Everyone called in before the Cleveland Browns kicked off. With our oven, a pizza took about 7 minutes to cook, and depending on the size of the pizza, you could fit one, maybe two, side by side. In an hour we might have pumped out 35 to 40, and usually there’d only be two or three of us slinging pies. I’d enter basically a flow state. And honestly, it felt good to see the pizzas go in the box. I knew someone out there was going to open that pizza, pull out a slice, bite into it, and be so happy. And in those moments, I was really proud.

My editor and I in Naples. I didn’t make this pizza, but I could have if called upon. “Vedi napoli e poi muori”

But when those times ended, and I was doing the dishes or mopping floors, and my mind was wandering, that’s when I started to think, “I don’t want to make pizzas for a living.” As if there’s something wrong with making people food they enjoy, or as if it’s less good than any other profession. I would have told myself to stop thinking that way. It’s good to have goals, sure. It’s good to think about what you want to do with your life. But enjoy the good aspects, don’t dwell so much on the parts you don’t like. And especially don’t get wrapped up in your “status.” 

2. Don’t confuse your career with your sense of self.

There’s often an implication that we have one identity and that identity is our sense of self. But they aren’t. We have several identities. One single person could be a writer, a runner, a violinist, a Browns fan, an amateur baker, a husband, a brother, a son, a cousin, a bibliophile, a gardener, ornithologist, philatelist, and philanthropist. Those are all different identities, all different sources of meaning and fulfillment in life. Too often, we are fooled into thinking that our career is who we are. But it’s not, it’s just a piece. We run into a lot of problems when we try to have one single identity. We try to force all of our actions to fit in line with this identity. Children often behave this way. They move from one all-encompassing obsession to the next. Kid likes dinosaurs? He’s going to want dinosaur clothes, dinosaur toys, dinosaur books, trips to the natural history museum, dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets, dinosaur TV shows. A more adult-oriented example might be someone who adopts whatever political stances are associated with a particular political party because being a Republican or a Democrat is such a huge part of their sense of self, so they mold their beliefs to fit that model of the world. 

The psychologist Erik Erickson (not to be confused with the conservative thought leader) theorized that a well-adjusted person is one who can properly integrate different facets and dimensions of themselves into a sense of self, whereas someone who cannot experiences an identity crisis. I personally think I struggled with this, more or less, my entire life. Whatever I was into, I tried to make everything an extension of that interest. Only recently did it sort of click that I can just be into all sorts of incongruent things. I can love sports and I can love anime. I like A$AP Rocky and Bedřich Smetana. I watch all the Marvel movies and everything by Federico Fellini. I work in journalism but I’m more than a journalist. 

This is critical because the more you choose to define yourself by your career, the more it’s going to affect your well-being. If you are unhappy at work, then you will be unhappy outside of work, because they have become one and the same. In 1902, the psychologist Charles Cooley coined the term “the looking glass self,” which is a tendency for people to see themselves the way they think others view them. Below, I’ll talk a bit about how you can combat this phenomenon, but the point here is that if your job or career is THE factor in your sense of self, then the way your boss, your coworkers, even your friends and family view your profession (or the way you think they view it) will play a massively outsized role on your well-being. And it just doesn’t need to be that way and shouldn’t be that way. You’re more than your job.

3. Find other areas to pursue personal growth.

We want to feel like we are productive and growing³, and our careers are a source of these feelings. Most of the anxiety I felt at this time in my life stemmed from the feeling that I was “stuck.” It is often immobilizing. I didn’t want to do anything when I got home from work except be upset about work. Eventually I started getting back into weight lifting, which is something I’ve always loved going back to high school. It didn’t make my job more fun, but it made it less all-encompassing. If I woke up and went to the gym, then I felt like I had accomplished something before I even got to work, and that feeling of accomplishment was huge in terms of my overall mental state. 

While it’s preferable that our careers support our basic psychological needs, if they don’t, we should try to find some other avenue. The first step to doing this is establishing boundaries between your job and the rest of your life, which is easier said than done but critical nonetheless. Things like working out, cooking, or learning a language are great because you can improve incrementally on your own time. They also demand your attention, which helps to live in the moment. You can replace the anxiety you’re feeling with a sense of accomplishment, satisfaction, and growth. If those activities aren’t for you, maybe gardening, coding, really anything that you find intrinsically satisfying, meaning that the act of doing the thing itself makes you feel good. 

4. Try to find a community or support group outside of the office.

Just like humans have an inherent desire to grow and contribute, we have a desire to be part of a group. A group could be a family, a sports team, a gym, a church group, a political movement. It could be a Facebook group of new moms, a fantasy football league or a running club. We need a crew and a sense of belonging.

As I said before, I liked the people I worked with. But that’s different from feeling like I was part of something. When I played high school football, that was being a part of something. When I worked at the student newspaper The Post at Ohio University, that was being a part of something. We were all moving together in the same direction, toward some shared sense of purpose together. But this job I had….it was just a job with nice people who, as far as I could tell, all more or less felt the same way.

Finding community within your workplace is great, but that’s not the only place you can find community. It’s in vogue these days for employers to talk about being a “family” and send out internal communications that look like they were written by Dominic Toretto after reading a piece of spon con in Quartz about office chemistry. Fostering a true sense of community takes effort every single day, every interaction. It can’t simply be mandated. It’s also the case that you could feel you are a truly valued member of a team, but remain unhappy because, perhaps, you think your growth has stalled.

The point is, you have to find your people in life. A workplace can satisfy the need we have for relatedness and community, but it’s not the only place to find it. 

5. Try mindfulness practice.

If I’m being honest, at 23 I might have rolled my eyes at this one. But studying and learning about mindfulness practice⁴ and meditating daily has been enormously helpful for my well-being. It helps me to stay present. The mantra “present awareness plus acceptance” is now imprinted on my brain. As I said in a previous essay, I’ve struggled with being present my entire life. Still isn’t something that comes naturally, but regular mindfulness practice is helping me to improve. 

A key aspect of my approach to mindfulness practice has been learning more about the cognitive and biological processes that underpin how our mind and brain work. It’s especially illuminating to understand how our brains evolved and how that impacts our thoughts.

We’re prone to thinking about future risks. This is a great tool for survival. It’s not a great tool for being a happy person. The cortex of the brain analyzes the past and imagines the future in an attempt to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. When we have a past experience that was unpleasurable, our brain stores that away and then tries to help us avoid it in the future. This is great when the brain locks on to an existential threat, like, say, a lion. It’s not as useful when it causes you to think about your irritating boss all weekend. Mindfulness practice helps to observe your thoughts as objects that are separate from yourself and to address why you are having them so you can better deal with them. It doesn’t make the thoughts just go away, you’re just able to manage them and, in time, allow them to pass.

Thinking back on “the looking glass self,” mindfulness has helped me be aware that thoughts and judgements are biological events that are supposed to help me survive but aren’t always reflections of reality. I’m prone to assume people think worse of me than they probably do, and think about me more often than they probably do. Understanding this helps me to break free of the anxiety that arises from a wandering, troublesome mind.

6. Unionize your workplace.⁵

I sadly don’t think I’d have had the balls to do this when I was 23, but I wish I did. Of course, forming a union is not necessarily an option for everyone, and you might already even be in one. But if you are currently in a job you don’t like, and are searching for a sense of meaning, community and autonomy, organizing your colleagues to form a union will check all of these boxes. It will help you to have more say in how your workplace functions and might even make your job enjoyable. 

It’s definitely no guarantee that you will instantly love your job. Forming a union is hard work, and can take years. I have never formed a union, but I know many people who have, including my beautiful, intelligent wife (who edits these posts). Something she and others have told me is that often forming a union is less about the here and now, and more about ensuring a better work environment for those that come after. 

Conclusion⁶

The basic premise of Rhapsody is that by exploring human nature and trying to understand what makes us tick, we can live happier, more fulfilling lives. The workplace is a pervasive setting for all of us, and it either will support or thwart your basic psychological needs. But it’s far from the only source of meaning and fulfillment in life. There are also ways we can mitigate the degree to which it thwarts our psychological needs. There’s no silver bullet though, no panacea, and unfortunately I don’t know of any society in the entire world that is constructed specifically to support its people’s happiness and psychological needs. So many of us are swimming upstream against institutions and cultural values—not to mention our own pesky brains—that aren’t optimized for our own happiness. It’s absolutely crucial to remember this because despite what a lot of people, a lot of media and a lot of charlatans will tell you, it’s not your fault. The good news is, there are ways to make it better, and I hope I have in some small way been helpful.

1. These basic psychological needs are the foundation of Self-Determination Theory. These particular definitions come from Ryan, R., & Deci, E., (2017) Self-Determination Theory: Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development, and Wellness. The Guilford Press.

2. Just to be clear here, there are some jobs and some situations that are irredeemable, especially if you feel in danger or are dealing with harassment. In those cases, I would seek help and guidance from professionals who know a lot more than me. Here’s some resources to help: What do I need to know about workplace harassment , What You Should Know: What to Do if you Believe you have been Harassed at Work. Please feel free to share other resources in the comments as well.

3. I often say that people have an inherent desire to grow and master skills. This part of the tradition of organismic theory, which holds that humans an inherent drive toward growth. 

4. This is a great primer on how mindfulness practice can affect the way your brain functions. 

5. Some resources for unionizing: AFL-CIO: Form a Union, Learn How to Form a Union in Your Workplace, Your Right to Form a Union, A Union, Explained, Why unions are good for workers—especially in a crisis like COVID-19

6. You may be wondering “Why six pieces of advice?” The answer, of course, is that the NFL is back this weekend and Baker Mayfield, the greatest football player of all time, wears number 6.