Your Job is Not Supposed to Make You Happy

Maybe you should lower your expectations.

Kyle Chastain
Index
Published in
6 min readAug 5, 2021

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Photo: Thought Catalog/Unsplash

I never used to dread going to work on Monday mornings. In those days, I ran a non-profit I started with a group of friends. I looked forward to every day. I enjoyed the autonomy and loved the creative work it allowed me to do. Then it failed and we had to shut it down.

I was out of a job with a wife and a small kid to support. My opportunity came in the form of a 9–5 job which was unrelated to anything I cared about or wanted to do with my life.

That’s when I started dreading Monday mornings.

I entered a world where most people seem miserable with their life. Everyone I know at work either wants to climb the ladder, or wants out. That’s basically how we’ve trained ourselves to live, isn’t it? Upward and onward, or on to the next shiny thing.

We’re discontent, unhappy, and overall miserable at work.

It doesn’t matter how much the company you work for talks about work-life balance. It’s not important that their values include “happiness” or “purpose” or “wellbeing.” When it comes down to it, as long as you work for someone else, your responsibility is to make the company more money.

If you can derive happiness from KPIs, quarterly earnings, and customer satisfaction, go for it. If you can chase a never-ending stream of goals for decades and never get tired of it, good for you. But it’s not your job’s responsibility to make you happy. The sooner you accept the truth, the sooner you might be able to do something about it.

You’re always building someone else’s dream

There’s a quote by the famous motivational speaker Zig Ziglar, “You can have everything in life you want if you will just help other people get what they want.”

That quote doesn’t hold up in the modern workplace.

I once worked with a woman who excelled at her job. She did all the work of a manager and got paid half a manager’s salary. When she tried to move up through the company, our regional leaders secretly blocked her. They gave her some cookie-cutter reasons, but she knew the truth was they didn’t want to have to replace her. The company…

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Kyle Chastain
Index
Writer for

On a mission to become a better writer and storyteller | Building my "Insight" newsletter to 10k+ | Create the life you want: https://chastain.substack.com/