In which unrequited counsel becomes a stream of babble...

Then again, it seems likely that any post like this is a call for advice. Christian hates his job, and has understandably begun to wonder if his general malcontent and short temper signifies something chemically amiss in his wetware. I doubt it. Christian's a cranky man, but I think he's generally far better-balanced than he gives himself credit for. He needs to find new work. Not a new job, but a radically different line of work. It's trite, but he has to find something that he loves to do, or he'll spend the rest of his life mired in this sort of restless antipathy.

I'm not doing what I love these last few months. My work is an endless, hurried banquet of minute, unsatisfying tasks that have never once engaged anything outside my reptilian complex. I write a dozen letters for other people a day, tasks so anxiously dull that I feel like instinctively rejecting the praise I receive for their quality. I tread water in a vast ocean of business buzzwords that bury the cliche-meter deep in the red zone.
I am genuinely confused by the deep satisfaction that most of my coworkers draw from their daily labours, which change not one whit between days. I don't begrudge them that - they've found something they enjoy doing day in and out - and I'm sure their heftier paydays lubricate the deal more than somewhat. They are fine people to work with, and my job is neither dangerous (sigh) nor unreasonably difficult nor cruelly underpaid. But this isn't what I'm meant to be doing.

I've been fortunate enough to find politics, which I excel at. I know what I'm supposed to be doing with my life, and I'm not doing it. I must return to work that I love as soon as possible. It's not always a picnic doing what you're best at, either - frustration and impatience are still my periodic companions. On a couple of dire occasions last year at the school in Thailand, my erstwhile boss and I came very close to violence. But for my part, I was so angry because I had legitimately different objectives which I felt he was obstructing. I was in a situation entirely unlike my current one, in that I was an expert in my field and he in his, and so we both had the philosophical footing to demand certain things from the project we shared.

Whereas I'm a rookie at my current job, a mid-level grunt spot in a dandy and well-respected human resources firm. If ever I'm certain I'm right - which happens less often than you might think - it doesn't matter. My superordinates' experience and rank trumps my conviction every time, and despite their superficial attempts to ladle more responsibility into my bowl, I'll never attain the rank and experience to go head-to-head with the powers that be when we fundamentally disagree about what's best for the organization.

That doesn't work for me. I'm not confrontational by any stretch, but I'm a person of conviction and I chafe enormously at lacking the intellectual freedom to set my own agenda to some significant degree. Christian, I think, is more like this than he has been willing to admit to himself. He's a smart guy, and he's frustrated. If I spent a decade selling plumbing supplies to ingrates and miscreants, my rage and contempt for humanity would start to poison the rest of my life too. But go straight for the cause, my friend. Chemical alteration is surely worst conceivable answer (with the possible exception of having kids to beat the boredom) - it doesn't even treat the symptoms of this malaise, it merely replaces some of them (anger and loathing) with others (mental slothfulness and serotonin malfunction). Religion won't help either - that just replaces a few of your dilemmas with larger ones, and then tells you you're going to hell if you dare to ask for real answers. The better solution (though I surely repeat myself) is find something you're bloody good at and that you immensely enjoys. This is surely easier counsel to give than follow, but it's true.

My advice to Christian and anybody else in this situation (including myself): take night classes in whatever the hell you're even vaguely curious about. Start reading the Economist cover to cover - more than once something I found in there sparked an interest that substantially redirected my entire life. Take up a serious hobby in which you run the risk of tragic failure - start growing green things, or making something with your hands, or learning some musical skill, or speaking a foreign language. Fail at things, get better at them, ignore your deep intrinsic laziness, and push far outside your intellectual comfort zone. This sounds like an idiot laundry list of generic self-improvement shite, but it's not - it's a shotgun approach to finding something that ignites a genuine creative passion that you've largely abandoned hope of finding. If you can't stick with it entirely of your own accord, do what I do - set up a system of penalties that screw you even harder if you stop trying. Then once you've found something you love to do can find a way to make money off it and stop doing all this make-work shit you can clearly no longer tolerate.

This is a lot of effort for uncertain reward. It's inconvenient, it's annoying, it might even be expensive - but if it saves you from spending the rest of your life enraged at your career and great infuriating masses of humanity, it would be a bargain at a thousand times the price.

Now I need to get back to following my own advice. I've got some jobs to find, and a thesis to publish, and a PhD to pursue. I'll let you know how that goes.