How much should you love your job?
I grew up hearing my mother say, ‘If you love your job, you will never work a day in your life.’ She was a flight attendant for 35 years and she loved everything about it; traveling, meeting people, making her passengers happy. In my father I saw the opposite side. After he was laid off from being an aircraft mechanic, which was a job he loved, he took a role at an oil refinery as a pump mechanic in order to keep us from having to move. He was working 14 hour days in below 0 temperatures. A few times per year he had to take his turn working night shifts. After one of these night shift weeks, I remember asking him if he liked his job. He said the only thing he liked about it was that it let him provide for us and live the life he wanted. ‘A job is a job.’
When I told my parents about wanting to go to school to study film, my dad was against it and my mother was supportive. It was the same rhetoric from their experiences: my mom wanted me to do something I loved, while my dad wanted me to do something that would be stable and where I could make a good living.
As I have grown older, and subsequently decided not to work in the film industry, I have had a debate going on in my mind. Is this really what I want to be doing? Am I happy? Does it even matter?
When your job is only to provide you with a paycheck, how much of your life do you really get to enjoy? You are spending 8 hours or more of your day on something you don’t care too much about. You are spending 1/3 of your life wishing for the time to pass. I don’t hate my job, but I don’t love every second of it. I look forward to the clock turning 5 so I can go home. I have tried creative pursuits after hours, like a painting class, but more often than not when I get home I find myself with the lack of energy to do anything other than relax.
So I don’t hate my life - that’s great. But as someone who once thought her career would be a creative pursuit, I often grapple with the question, what am I contributing to this world? I romanticized the idea of ‘climbing the corporate ladder’ as a first-generation student, the first person in my family to work a ‘white collar’ job. Spending my career working in advertising, in sales, in finance, I find myself craving a more tactical career. One where I am creating, contributing something real, not just client dollars to a team quota.
I have quite a few friends on the opposite end of the spectrum. These friends who have jobs that orbit around their creative passions (designers, writers, artists) end up so burnt out from doing their passion all day that they have no creativity left for themselves. All of their passion is used up by their corporation, their creativity turned into profit for people above them.
I also have found that when you rely on your creativity for a paycheck, to sustain your life, you may grow to resent the thing you used to love to do.
As a current or former creative gone corporate, if you are struggling with defining your creative pursuits and desires in the same way I am, I highly suggest doing ‘The Artist’s Way’ workbook. I know it has become something of a cliche at this point, but taking that step in exploring my passions outside of work was incredibly motivating and the only reason I am writing this article now - because I pushed myself to do things I love on my own time, even if it’s not for my career.
So my question remains - how much should you really love your job? I honestly don’t have an answer. The truth may be subjective to each person, but one thing is for certain either way: whether you love your job or not, holding time for yourself to do things you love outside of work is crucial.