I like my job

A character in the novel I’m currently reading says “Everybody hates their job. That’s why it’s called a job.”

First, let's distinguish between work and toil. Work is effort towards some meaningful sense of personal fulfillment. While the effort may be uncomfortable and unpleasant at times, the goal of work should be a sense of accomplishment and personal growth. Toil is meaningless effort; a dead-end job with routine and/or stressful tasks that don’t permit learning or growth is toil. So everyone may well hate a job that amounts to toil.

By the time I finished my junior year in college, I’d set my sights on a career in academic research. I wanted to be a tenured full professor at a university. There was much work to do to reach that goal. Grad school was hard and filled with opportunities for failure (most of the work in my dissertation was done in my final year). Postdoctoral fellowship was hard, usually working 60+ hrs/week. Being an untenured assistant professor and being told that I’d have to get out of science if I didn’t get tenure was scary. I saw others who embraced the same path eventually leave in grad school, stop at the postdoc level, or fail to get tenure. As I’ve told many people: most people hate their job because it is boring; there are things I dislike about my job, but it’s never been boring. I never hated my job.

The same job that is work for one person is toil for another. I’ve never been in the military, but I’ve always regarded the lot of an enlisted man as toil. However, I’ve encountered enough people who have served as enlisted men and women and who recall those days fondly that I accept a different perception.

The major reason I’m struggling with retirement is that I genuinely love much of what I do. My job was a good fit for me. It gave me an outlet for my creativity, companionship both at my workplace and around the world, and a connection with an enterprise much greater than myself. I can’t yet imagine how to replace that.