People are staring at me.
I’m sitting at LAX Gate 12 after a week-long vacation. I can’t stop crying. My flight home leaves in an hour and I’m overcome with sadness. As the tears fall down my face, a woman with kind eyes sits beside me and asks, “Are you okay?”
I consider saying something like “I’m fine” and pulling myself together, but I don’t have the energy to lie to her. I tell her the truth instead.
“I don’t want to go back to work. I hate my job,” I say.
She seems genuinely curious and asks, “What’s so awful about it?”
“Nothing, it’s perfect” I respond. “That’s the problem.”
She sits in silence for a moment before frowning and getting up to rejoin her husband across from me. She whispers to him, then they move to the other side of the gate.
I don’t blame them.
My job
I’ve worked in IT consulting since I was 25 years old. I’m now 50, at the pinnacle of my career. I work for a prominent technology company with tens of thousands of employees. I speak regularly at industry conferences. I solve complex technical problems that make lives easier. My white papers are considered the standards for the industry.
By all professional measurements, I’ve arrived.
I’ve worked from home since March 2000. My work uniform is one of five “Zoom-worthy” blouses and joggers. I swim laps over my lunch hour at my neighborhood pool. Afternoon naps are the rule with rare exceptions. My Fridays end early and my Mondays start when I feel like it. I never work outside of business hours.
To say that I have an ideal work environment would be an understatement.
Although I’ve been self-employed for much of my career, my current employer has incredible pay and benefits. I take about eight weeks off per year, fully utilizing an unlimited time off policy. I’m paid well. I was hired at the beginning of the COVID pandemic when technology companies were desperate for my skill set. I negotiated a salary package I could never get today.
Jobs don’t get any better than this.
Why I hate it
When I share with close friends how unhappy I am at work, they suggest I’m bored. Their solution is seeking out greater challenges in my current role or finding another position at my company. Or maybe I need a new hobby outside of work. Anything to feed my innate need to solve problems.
But I’m not bored — I’m disillusioned.
After 25 years in the workforce, I’ve become a bit of a nihilist when it comes to the IT industry. It’s all meaningless. I’m dealing with the same issues over and over again. The industry never learns from its mistakes. I’m exhausted from the merry-go-round.
For example, one of my first software implementations involved developing a system for hospitals to manage their billing more efficiently. The project was understaffed, over budget, poorly tested, and delivered late. Dozens of people quit because of the dysfunction and poor working conditions.
One of the projects I’m currently working on, 25 years later, is suffering the same difficulties. But now it’s worse because the team is all over the world, including India and Poland. Time zones mean nothing, there is no downtime. There used to be at least 8 hours of quiet when people were asleep. That’s not the case anymore.
There’s also an attitude problem. Since the market for IT professionals has tanked in the last year, people aren’t leaving jobs where they are unhappy. This shows up in the way people show up to work. My company laid off 10% of its workforce last year and unsurprisingly, the culture has suffered. What used to be a fun, light-hearted workplace has collapsed into a collective malaise and apathy. Everyone has a complaint and is willing to voice it.
My greatest disillusionment is with leadership. Perhaps it’s always been this way, but my company’s ability to massage the truth in the interest of making a profit astounds me. I value telling the truth to clients and playing the long game. A client who trusts me is a client for life. This conflicts with today’s short-term thinking. It’s frustrating when my values don’t align with my employer’s.
Whether it’s dealing with the same issues repeatedly, the poor culture, or leadership’s lack of integrity, I’m disillusioned and I hate my job.
Now what
From the outside, it looks like I have everything. I work from home, make great money, and have plenty of vacation time. I should be grateful. But instead, I’m crying on Sunday evenings at the thought of going back to work and scaring off strangers in airports.
As much as I try to see my job as transactional, purely an endeavor to pay my bills, it still makes me miserable. I hate it. I’m so disillusioned that only daydreaming gives me a bit of relief.
After my divorce, when I was too grief-stricken to work in IT consulting, I worked at a spa. My job responsibilities included answering phones, greeting guests, and my favorite task, folding towels. Something was soothing about removing the towels still warm from the dryer and folding them into perfect stacks of fluffy, white cotton.
When my disillusionment with work gets to be too much, I throw a few towels in my dryer at home and practice folding them. Remembering how much I loved my job at the spa soothes me.
I wonder if they’re hiring.
