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Wellness Wednesday for April 19, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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How many of y’all find purpose in your career? I try to but ultimately I don’t think my work is that important. I’m not sure what else I could reasonably do that is important, is the problem.

I have people I care about and get meaning from other sources, but work is a perennial stress in my life since I spend so much time on it. Periods in my life where I haven’t had to work have been excellent and I have zero issues finding happiness and meaning, but obviously we have to make a living.

How does everyone else cope with a lack of meaningful employment?

I worked for the same company from before graduation till the end of 2021, and there were periods between large projects when I was feeling down. But now I work for an even larger company, and I have been stressed out by that feeling of barely treading water.

I switched jobs to grow as a manager, but the experience has been quite different. Back at the old place, I had lots of slack as defined by DeMarco, so I could get down to the bottom of an issue that wasn't my direct responsibility, meet with people in charge of that thing and get them to change it. Here my schedule looks like my boss' boss' schedule back at the old place: double-booked meetings from nine to six. Even when I claw out a couple of hours of peace, I'm so frazzled I can't really concentrate on anything beyond cleaning my mailbox. Even if I could, the place is so huge, I feel like I'm a cog in the machine: the gears turn the way they do, and I'll just get my teeth stripped if I resist. And yet my boss manages to thrive in this environment: she finds time to think, to come up with ideas, to convince others, all this while having a worse schedule.