In college I made up a position for myself in my fraternity - leadership and professional development chairmen. This mostly consisted of me giving biweekly self-indulgent - and mostly ill received - speeches about integrity, responsibility, and other topics whose impact is often dependent on the deliverer. In this case, the deliverer, a twenty-something collegiate with minimal work and life experience, was not poised to make a big impact. And so my speeches became something of a meme among my friends.
The other responsibility I bestowed on myself was acting mentor/life coach/guidance counselor to any and all of my brothers that needed someone to point them in the right direction. I combed over Resumes, planned college course selection, talked through academic major decisions, and gave my guidance on potential internships and post-grad job opportunities. I loved it. It made me feel as if I was making a difference and in truth, I did. Every so often I’ll get a text from a friend I sat down with thanking me for being there for them. I still get texts from friends I haven’t seen in years asking me for my advice.
But before I burst a blood vessel tooting my own horn let me be perfectly honest about something:
I never did any of that for anybody else. I did it for me. Nobody needed me to help them, I needed to help them.
You see, all the energy I spent writing and orating speeches, correcting resumes, and providing advice was spent in the interest of concealing one key detail:
I have no fucking idea what I’m doing or what I want to be doing in my life.
No clue. I’ve never had any idea. Some people have known what they wanted to do with their lives since they could legally sit in the back of their mom’s 2008 Dodge Grand Caravan without the assistance of a car seat. My clearest memory from those years is wanting to be a grocery store cashier because I thought they got to keep the money.
I have a deeply seated jealousy of my friends who have known their purpose since their diaper years and that comes out, constructively or not, in the form of providing assistance. The future lawyers, or doctors, or accountants, or biologists, or teachers, or Speech Language Pathologists. These friends understood their end goal. So let’s sit down and write out a plan to get from Point A to Point B as quickly and efficiently as possible. Let’s talk about the hurdles you’re going to need to jump over. Let’s explore the best companies to intern at to give you a competitive advantage when you enter the marketplace next year. And let’s not talk about me being a Human Resources Management major with zero interest in benefit plans or how I spent my last two summers making little to no money in a sales job and forgetting to set aside money for the independent contractor taxes that would hit me during the school year and leave me broke and scared.
Halfway through my Senior Year I told myself I was going to learn how to be a salesperson and then go from there. I didn’t want to go into sales for the money, or because I like people (I do, mostly, but that’s besides the point), and I certainly wasn’t going into sales for the work-life balance. I wanted to go into sales because it was going to be hard for me and I wanted to be uncomfortable. That was my actual rationale for a decision that was going to directly impact the next forty years of my life. I can’t make this shit up.
After stumbling through a four and half year stint at Central Michigan I entered the workforce in January of 2019. I’ve been a “professional” that has been “building his career” over the last three years and these are the things I’ve learned along the way.
Tip #1: Your Job Isn’t Supposed to Make You Happy (but it shouldn’t actively make you unhappy)
In 2020, a year that most of my friends were living off Trump checks and enhanced unemployment, I made over a quarter of a million dollars.
I was also catatonically depressed and teetering on the edge of complete mental collapse before I broke for lunch most afternoons.
I languished twelve hours a day in my shoebox bedroom with only myself and the disinterested voices on the receiving end of my telephone keeping me company. My life became a waterfall of apathy. I lived to work - 7:45am to 7:00pm - and when my work was over all I could do was wash the taste of it out of my mouth with small comforts - greasy Doordash meals, mindless TV Series, and a night cap. I never exercised, there wasn’t enough left of me. I couldn’t read, or write, there was nothing left at the end of my days. All that I was left with was the realization that tomorrow I’d have to do it all again and the urge to do drugs about it.
But I was good at it. Really good. I was better at it than I’d ever been at anything else before. I was placed on a pedestal in front of others. An example of what to do and who to be.
And so I stayed. And I stayed miserable.
In March of 2021 I took a two month medical leave of absence. The origin of that is a story for another time but ultimately I was left with two months of free time to take care of my mental health and give myself a break from the grind.
And guess what happened?
If you guessed that I got better you guessed wrong. Nerd.
I was still depressed throughout my medical sabbatical and no amount of all day video game marathons could fix me.
There’s certainly something to be said about my idle mind finding things to fixate on purely out of boredom, but mostly I couldn’t heal because I knew that I had to go back. After this temporary respite I was going to be back in that chair at 7:45am, taking my first cold call by 8am, and wanting to throw my fist through my office door by 8:15am.
In fact, that’s exactly what happened. Two weeks after I returned to my role I threw a roundhouse at my office door.
A few weeks after that I quit.
Or at least I tried to quit. They talked me into taking a different role in the company which, thankfully, has worked out much better.
I no longer live to work. My day-to-day role suits my skillset significantly better than my prior role. My job still doesn’t make me happy, but it doesn’t actively work against me anymore. It leaves room for me to make myself happy. That’s what’s important.
Let me repeat that: my job doesn’t add happiness to my life, but it doesn’t take any happiness away. It’s a net neutral. I work 9-5 and the rest of my life is my own to focus on my health, build my relationships, and practice my hobbies.
Now, ideally, we’d all like to find a job that is a net positive. A role that brings happiness and fulfillment to our lives and helps us become fully actualized people. But, for me, at least, I have no fucking idea what I’m doing (remember?). So I’ll settle for now on net neutral until I clear that up.
My roommate, Matt, works a job that makes him actively unhappy too - but only sometimes. Every couple of weeks he'll walk through the front door at 6pm, beeline to the fridge and crack a beer. “Bro” he says as he turns to me “I’m fucking done with this job.” I can tell in his eyes that he means it. The 5am wakeups, low pay, and obnoxious customers are poison.
But the next day if I ask Matt what his plans are there’s a change of tone. “You know, today wasn’t so bad. I’ve already put in so much work to get where I am. The pay is okay and it could get better after a few years. I think I’ll stick it out”
If you can see yourself in Matt, I’ll tell you what I tell him every time:
Don’t forget how you felt on your bad days when the pain wears off.
Which brings me to my next point.
Tip #2: You’re Only Scared of Leaving Your Job Because You Haven’t Narrowed It Down Enough
A few weeks ago my friend, David, called me for advice.
He was thinking about leaving his job. He wasn’t happy. He knew it wasn’t ultimately work that was going to fulfill him, he had the strength to go on now but knew he was going to eventually go nose first into a brick wall and not be able to will himself over it. But he was making money, and the lifestyle fit him, and he liked the people, and most importantly, he was scared of what the next step was going to be if he left.
David had a rough idea of what he’d like to do and he’d browsed some LinkedIn job descriptions with exciting buzzwords (“looking for an Outside the Box thinker that can deliver unprecedented synergy into a deep dive on agile business frameworks to align with company culture”). David is a smart guy with a lot of experience - companies would be happy to hire him. But the problem is that the possibilities were endless. There are so many possible futures that it becomes impossible to clearly envision yourself in any of them.
This is exactly why I felt so stuck too.
I could tell you exactly what my probable almost certain future looked like if I stayed in my previous role: I would go on being miserable, continue to make good money, my heath would keep declining, my relationships would likely falter and if I didn’t completely self-destruct I could probably retire in another 10-15 years.
But if I left my job I had no idea what my future looked like. I didn’t know where I would work, what I would do, or what my life would look like if I left.
I wasn’t clear on my future.
If you want to be able to make fearless decisions you need to understand the reality of the other option.
How do you do that?
By doing your research. You’ve probably heard the phrase “the best time to look for a job is while you have a job”. This is good advice.
Take interviews, reach out to people that are in the role you’re looking to fill and ask them about their day to day, go above and beyond to understand what’s on the other side of the curtain until you have a clear picture of your potential future. Get a job offer from another company.
At that point if you’re satisfied that the new future looks better than the path you’re on, jump ship.
Disclaimer: This is a case of do what I say, not what I do. I just quit. The point though, is if I would have taken the time to explore other possible futures it wouldn’t have taken me so maddeningly long to make a damn decision.
Tip #3: Don’t Opt For Cheap Health Insurance
I thought I was being real slick dropping my health insurance coverage to save $50 a month and my out-of-pocket for prescriptions and therapy cost me $70 more per month. Real jackass move. Just pick the middle option if you don’t understand what you’re looking at.