Purposelessness

Every job I’ve worked, it all ends up feeling pointless. You show up every day, you do your best, you outperform most other people, you follow all the rules even when others don’t, but you go nowhere. Every day starts to feel like “why am I even here,” and “this is just a waste of time,” maybe that’s because it is. It’s hard to feel like your job matters when, to you, it really doesn’t. You show up on time and give an honest effort, but that’s only because you’d feel like a bad person if you didn’t. But does the job itself actually matter to you? Or just whether or not you do a good job at it? For me it’s the latter. I don’t stop trying because I don’t want to be someone whose slack has to be picked up by someone else, I don’t want to make things harder for other people. But at the end of the day I go home and wonder why I bothered showing up in the first place. If the majority of your time is going to be spent at work, it has to be a job you actually care about. Otherwise you start resenting and even hating the job and, if the job is most of your time, most of your life, you start to hate your life. It may sound impossible, maybe the job you want is highly selective, maybe it doesn’t exist yet. It may be scary because the path you want to take is not a sure one, but think of the alternative. I’d rather try and try to escape the monotony and lack of purpose and end up homeless and broke than live somewhat paradoxically more comfortably in a life I can’t stand. It’s better to shoot your shot and miss than to never shoot at all. “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars” -Norman Vincent Peale