The best way to be really unhappy at work is to integrate the job into your identity.
Happy workers go to work (metaphorically speaking, because many people work from home) in order to do their job, get paid and then go home.
Unhappy workers go to work to feel a certain way, experience a certain range of emotions, and foster a certain sense of self. And in this way, they set themselves up for disappointment and heartache because a sense of self can’t be found at work and brought home. It has to be carried around inside one and brought to work or anywhere one goes.
Look, folks, I love my job more than any other academic I know. I love everything about it – the students, the colleagues, the campus, the research. I don’t like the governor of Illinois but he’s only part of academia inasmuch as he’s part of the state where my piece of academia happens to be located at the moment.
However, I’m not my job. I’m not emotionally or existentially attached to it. If for whatever reason I couldn’t be an academic any longer, this would not impact my sense of self. Because the sense of self does not reside at work. It resides inside me.
If you are younger than me and have no idea what I’m on about, that’s fine. This comes with age in most, except for some very fortunate and psychologically healthy, people.
Clarissa's Blog 
Exactly! I still remember how some people told me sadly when I retired from the military and from practicing medicine 18 years ago that I’d feel “lost” and “disconnected” and vaguely guilty about being “useless,” etc., etc.
I hope that some of those co-workers lived long enough to realize how wrong they were.
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I often see colleagues who are no longer healthy and energetic enough to do the work but still don’t retire because they literally don’t know what to do with themselves in retirement. And that’s very sad.
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If it weren’t for the administration screwing up everything and hacking away at the liberal arts as if we were useless, I think I’d be modestly happy in my job. But the lack of support, the constant threat to be cut, the unfair pay, on top of stress etc. is killing the joy I take in the other aspects of my job. The only good thing is that I’m learning that the job isn’t who I am. I don’t know why I couldn’t figure that out any other way apart from futile suffering over it.
I will very likely either leave this job for greener pastures or leave academia entirely. The oppressive nature of my school that wants to crush liberal arts makes me feel like all my efforts are in vain.
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I think the attacks on liberal arts really set me in my existential crisis, because everything I value is undermined every single day. That happens most regularly at my job and makes me feel like a fool for caring.
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I used to worry about these things, too, but older colleagues who have been in academia for 30-40 minutes told all these cuts are like a game or a hazing ritual that has always existed and that taking it seriously was a waste of time. And when I consider that decades ago people worried about the same (or similar) cuts in the same way but still everything is fine and all that worry was in vain, that helps.
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“I used to worry about these things too…”
Except at my school, a tenured professor has been fired without cause, three programs in the liberal arts have been eliminated without faculty approval, my new program for my department that the faculty approved eight months ago is being blocked by the provost (despite the fact that we already have majors signed up!), and there is a mass exodus of junior faculty who see the writing on the wall. The liberal arts are not mentioned once in the ten-year strategic plan. All majors in languages other than Spanish have been eliminated. Art has been gutted. The gen ed curriculum is being rewritten by an administrator who is not an academic, and the liberal arts requirements are being slashed by half. If this isn’t a crisis, I don’t know what is!
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In fact, the smug silence of the senior faculty is actually allowing this to happen! They think they can vote against these changes and block them, but so far the administration has forced through anything they want. The faculty is impotent.
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This sounds absolutely horrible. But things won’t get any better of you burn out while these senior faculty sit there, contemplating their navels in happy self-absorption. Getting the book out and looking for a new job might be the best way to go. This is what I decided to do because I have realized that there is not a single person at my university who is even marginally interested in opposing the state administration’s plan to transform all but one state universities in online diploma mills.
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Within Corporate Maoist Cults, you’re encouraged to drink the “Flavor Aid” every day, and you’re surprised every day when it doesn’t actually kill you outright, but you suspect it’s actually killing you through a programme of life attrition …
BTW, writers don’t retire, we simply leave a desk of messy artefacts that our inheritors are supposed to sort out on our behalf, working from the almost impossible assumption that they’d have a clue what any of them are about. 🙂
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Your description of the philosophy and attitude of happy workers is the exact opposite of the one American workers adopt and are encouraged to adopt.
Your post explains why workplaces which describe themselves as being “like a family” and family run businesses are often such miserable places to work. It also explains the high rate of misery among academics and lawyers and any such job described as a “calling”, especially if it’s relatively high status.
It’s the difference between “I am a lawyer” and “I work as a lawyer”
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“Your post explains why workplaces which describe themselves as being “like a family” and family run businesses are often such miserable places to work. ”
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\ I often see colleagues who are no longer healthy and energetic enough to do the work but still don’t retire because they literally don’t know what to do with themselves in retirement. And that’s very sad.
You talked against women choosing to be housewives since not fulfilling the need to function in the public sphere leads to them cannibalizing children’s and husbands’ lives. Does this need disappear after a certain age? Why can’t a 50 year old woman be a housewife w/o hurting others, but at the age of 65 she is supposed to become capable of it?
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By the age of 65, everybody you were meant to harm has been harmed already. 🙂
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