Work, Monotony, and Happiness

Something unexpected has been happening to me over the last few weeks.  I've started to enjoy my work.

I'm having difficulty processing this.  How to react to this realisation?  Resist, or submit?  Enjoying your life is important, and not something to dismiss simply because it comes from an unexpected source.  If there are tedious, monotonous, esoteric tasks in your life that you actually enjoy doing, then you should embrace that.  Sometimes happiness just happens.

Some of my work is tedious.  And strangest of all, it's the tedium of it I find myself enjoying most of all.  I think this must be because it's tedium with purpose - collecting and working out how to manage a large amount of information, to be built into a collaborative, cloud-based database for the benefit of a large health and social care organisation.  When it's launched, I hope, it will significantly improve the services we provide for some of society's vulnerable people.  We're terrible at handling information, and the processes we use for doing so are so antiquated and bureaucratic as to be barely functional.  The result of all this is confusion, frustration, and the pointless proliferation of paperwork, which serves a purpose neither to the people providing the services nor to those receiving them.  I won't go into any more detail than that just now - I can't, without lapsing into business-speak - suffice to say it's a genuinely worthwhile project.  It has some of the markings of a bullshit job but doesn't fully qualify as one.  Or I don't think so, anyway.  You can never be sure with jobs.

This t-shirt actually exists, implying the existence of
people who unironically love hoovering.  Think about that.

But aren't I "anti-work"?  Well, yes.  And I remain so.  That almost everyone in modern society has to choose between wage labour and destitution is one of the great evils of our world.  It's an invisible, intangible and seemingly necessary evil, but one that's made all the more evil by its being so.  So to clarify, I'm not anti-work per se, so much as anti-job.  If work is defined only as doing things for a reason, then I'm not against that.  I'm quite often in favour of doing things, at least some of them for a reason.  Not all work involves jobs - a great deal of it, apparently, persists despite and even in contradiction of, the presence of jobs - but all jobs involve work.  The work done by people with jobs is very often pointless, frustrating, repetitive, demeaning and depressing - but there is always a reason for it, even when that reason is bullshit.  No work is done on the job overtly, intentionally and admittedly for no reason.  Where no reason exists, someone will make one up.  It may or may not be the person doing the work who makes up the reason for doing it - but if nobody does or can, the work will not continue.  This is in the nature of jobs.

All jobs, should, in my opinion, make the person doing them happy.  That is my fundamental political stance.  Life should be happy, and if life has to involve working, then working should involve and facilitate happiness, too.  It is only acceptable to structure a society in such a way that having a job is the only alternative to poverty where those jobs also, and without exception, make the people doing them happy.

And here's the thing about happiness.  It's not something you earn by achieving goals set only for yourself.  Happiness comes from making others happy.  Your life, considered in isolation from all other lives, is meaningless.  But meaning is found in giving meaning to others.  Try denying this.  Try living as if it isn't true.  It won't make you happy.  Of this I am absolutely certain.

So, if you want to be happy in your job, find one that that serves to make others happy.  You may find it has very little to do with how high your salary is - though obviously if it isn't high enough to cover the cost of your life, then that isn't going to help much with the happiness, but beyond that, more money isn't going to correlate very closely with more happiness.  But the more your work contributes both to your own happiness and that of others (without both, neither can exist), the happier you will be.  Make yourself happy by making others happy.  It's a virtuous circle.

Related posts

A Case of the Mondays
The No-Day Working Week
The Map and the Terrain
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