One of the things that makes work even more miserable is that feeling of hopelessness and disempowerment. Turning up every day, working hard, and finding things haven’t changed at all or, even more depressing, got worse. Knowing that the problems in your job, and the problems underlying those problems, cannot be solved by you. All you can do is patch things up when they break.
That feeling saps every vestage of life from your soul if it hangs around too long. It’s been shown that the lower down the power tree you are at work, the more unhealthy and miserable you become. Any time you hear some high-powered business man talking about the “stress of responsibility”…just slap him.
In fact, life in general is exactly the same. When you start to notice that your entire life is not in your own hands. Getting in more debt. Getting stung by banks, estate agents, insurance companies and lawyers. Watching the world decay into war, fascism and ignorance and knowing that whatever you do can’t change that.
But today I found a solution. Really. Well, a solution for the work one anyway. But who knows ? Maybe it can apply to other aspects of life too.
It’s so simple: just make sure that at the end of the day you achieve something. Preferably something that stretches you a bit. At 5pm, after a typically dismal day, I decided to knock an item off of my burgeoning TODO list. It was low priority but needed a lot of investigation to solve it. But afterwards it shone an entirely different light on the day. A feeling of triumph, no matter how small, really puts a crack in that relentless rolling wheel of misery.
Maybe the answer to feeling better about your life and the world is just to ensure you have the odd victory…no matter how small. These things add up.
OTOH maybe I’m just talking a lot of naive, whimsical crap.
