Why Your Job Sucks

And how to make it more meaningful.

This article is meant for those of you who might feel dissatisfied with your current job, or even trapped and as though what you are doing is purposeless and doesn’t align with your larger goals in life. While it is true that most modern jobs are terribly disconnected from those forms of labor that naturally provide a man with purpose, there are things you can do to make even the most soul crushing of jobs not only bearable but actually meaningful.

It’s Simpler Than You Might Think

We are incredibly complex creatures, but when it comes to motivation and satisfaction, we can actually be quite simple. We don't require too much to feel uplifted and hopeful. The main problem is that modern life, and more precisely, modern corporate jobs, do a tremendous job at eliminating precisely the very few things that we need to feel motivated and satisfied about our circumstances, which is in no small part why so many young men are now lost and depressed.

I’m not saying this to be pessimistic, but it’s no lie that modern jobs can crush your soul. It’s very easy to feel purposeless when your entire day consists of sitting under blue lights typing numbers into excel spreadsheets. It’s not your fault to feel disconnected, deeply bored, and imprisoned by corporate life. We were never meant to sit under blue lights for the majority of our waking hours. We were never meant to atrophy our bodies by underutilizng them, or let our brains decay by having them perform monotonous, unchallenging, and repetitive tasks day after day after day.

I’ve always said that having a job is a blessing. It’s definitely better to have one than to suffer the pains of unemployment. But even if we accept our jobs with gratitude and humility, it’s no lie that regular 9 to 5’s nowadays are far from ideal. They are bad for your physical and mental health, they reduce you to just a cog in a machine, and often are so demanding that they steal your entire life. Not the best way to go about life.

Modern corporate jobs are simply unnatural. That’s a fact. But that does not mean it is impossible to reframe your mindset and circumstances in order to make them meaningful, and yes, even enjoyable.

The good news is that instead of complaining about it and becoming sore and pessimistic, we can take action to make things better for ourselves. And even in a corporate setting, you can do a lot of things to increase your satisfaction, reduce your stress levels, and step away from the purposeless void that the vast majority of men fall into. Here’s how.

The Causes Of Dissatisfaction

Lack of Agency

I used to work a regular job. It was an 8 to 6, at a little, boring office. Even though I knew at that time I wouldn’t be working a regular job for too long, having that experience was extremely interesting. It allowed me to observe from within how corporate life works.

I saw my time at the office as an experiment, which instantly made it ten times more fun. I got to see, analyze, and understand human nature, and it allowed me to really observe the major problems with the white collar way of earning a living. This in turn allowed me to find a deeper understanding of the reasons why most people that work regular jobs are not very happy, and in many cases, plain miserable. Reminding myself to look at my experience from the outside also kept me from getting sucked in mentally and emotionally into the daily stresses of a job. This is easier said than done, but it’s a very effective way of maintaining your independence and not letting your identity be determined by your job.

One of the main things I identified was somewhat obvious, but critical: Lack of agency. If you work a regular job, you probably have a boss, and having a boss means that you don't get to autonomously decide what you do (at least not from 9 am to 5 pm every day). This is a big issue. Even though you're getting paid, not being able to freely decide how you allocate your time and energy can be very draining. Add to that the fact that most jobs also remove your agency regarding where to live, how to dress, and other major and minor details of your life and you have a system that feels way too close to a prison.

Feeling in control of your circumstances is one of the most important factors when it comes to motivation, and consequently having no autonomy or agency makes us feel terrible. That's the first problem with most modern jobs.

Lack of Purpose

If you work a regular 9 to 5 job, you've probably faced this problem.You are such a small cog in such a big machine that you can't see or understand the consequences of your work. This leads to a crisis of purpose. It’s not easy to have a good enough answer to the question “why am I doing this?” when your work is repetitive, manual, inconsequential, and plain meaningless.

A man needs to feel connected to a deeper purpose, and typing numbers in a computer for 8 hours every day doesn't give him one. It's difficult to see what the point is, and this makes many men feel inadequate and… useless.

When the vast majority of your day is spent doing things that are completely disconnected from a higher purpose, it’s very easy to feel you’re wasting your life away.

"Is this all there is to life?", the corporate worker asks himself while his boss requests yet another set of changes to the presentation.

I’m here to tell you the answer to that question is that there is way more to life. And you don’t necessarily have to quit your job to experience it. We’ll get to that.

Lack of Mastery

Mastery is the third pillar of motivation, understood as one's ability to perform a task properly and masterfully. A man needs to feel he’s competent to feel aligned and satisfied with what he’s doing. He needs to know he has valuable skills to offer and he needs to exercise those skills frequently.

Lack of mastery is not usually a problem in corporate life, especially because most tasks in most companies are extremely easy to perform. But there is still the problem of meaninglessness: being the best in the world at building hyperspecific presentations for one hyperspecific company doesn’t really make a man feel like all that much.

Still, being good at what you do can make a significant difference in your motivation and happiness levels, so keep that in mind.

How to Make It Better