Ask Polly: My Great Job At A Top International News Publication Sucks Ass!
Dear Polly,
I’m in my mid-20s, two years out of school, with a seemingly dreamy job at big fancy news organization, but I feel so stuck. I feel like a hamster spinning my wheel and going nowhere. I can’t figure out if this is a normal early-20s feeling.
For our entire lives up until we enter The Real World, we have classes and semesters: variety. Every couple months you have something new to work on, a new group of people to be around. But in The Real World, you have a job and you do it for years, the same thing day in and day out. And just two years into my job, I’m bored. I feel so unmotivated.
Is this a change I’m just going to have to deal with? Or is this a sign I need to start looking for something else to do with my life?
I didn’t originally plan on journalism. That was my backup plan — my extra, hey, what the heck? major. But of course, the recession wasn’t conducive to recent college graduates living out their dreams. Luckily, I found a really great internship that led to a really great job. (What does that tell you about my dream job if I couldn’t find work there but I could in the dying field of journalism?)
I miss the days of having concrete assignments, short-term goals to work for (midterms, finals, graduation, etc.), a constant variety and things I could check off my list. (And yes, I really did have lists. They were color-coded.) I spent my entire early life working hard at school, so that I could become the first person in my family to go to college, so I could get at least some scholarship money and go to not just any college — but to a fancy East Coast Private School, 1,200 miles away from home and my evil step-father (another story). Now I’ve completed that goal, and I feel lost.
I feel like I can’t leave my job. There are so many people who would kill for my job. Every day that I’m unhappy and bored, I feel ungrateful. I could be unhappy and bored at some reception desk, but instead I’m unhappy and bored at a top international publication. Life isn’t that bad, right? I’m so lucky to be where I am and do what I do. But I feel like a Martian for feeling so stuck so early in life and with such a seemingly great job.
I don’t want end up as one of those people who hate life because they don’t like their job, but I also don’t know if this is normal, something to adjust to. Also, I also have NO idea what else I’d want to do with my life. My original dream job seems increasingly unattainable, and I’m not so sure I wouldn’t end up bored there as well. Oh, and there is also the reality of student loans, which make me feel financially tied to my job as well. (Even though — as I’m sure you know — as a journalist, I make basically nothing).
Cheers,
Bored and Lacking Drive
Dear BALD,
When you say “top international publication” what I think is this: Fuck publications, and being on top. I’m a career bottom. They can take me however they want me, as long as they don’t force me to move with purpose and authority. I’m too lazy for that shit.
Fuck stuff that’s international, too, unless it smells good and you can eat it. And fuck the news cycle, too. Fuck those dipshits on “Newsroom” and their unbearable real-life counterparts. You know what I like? Small, pointless things. When someone says, “I work at a crappy little place that makes pet rocks. I literally glue eyeballs on chunks of gravel all day long,” that makes my pulse race a little. Especially when it’s run out of someone’s laundry room that smells like cat piss, and the employees heat up Spaghettios in a microwave for lunch, and the boss comes downstairs to complain about his wife while they’re eating.
Even more off-point: I just bought coffee from this kid who asked me if I had anything special planned for the day. The kid was maybe 19, had spikey hair, and had a dead look in his eyes when he asked me about my “special plans” like his special plan was to disembowel a few small animals after work. What the hell did he think a fortysomething like me might have planned that would be special? A little extra mayo in my tuna salad? A root canal? A colonoscopy?
I think my main point here is that jobs are what you make them. Your belief system matters a lot, as do your personal preferences about people, places, and top publication micro-cultures. For some insane reason, everyone agrees that things that are “top” and “publishing”-related and “international” are exciting — at least they seem to agree about this in major coastal cities, and on Twitter. And also, small-town folks will inform you that you’ve made the big-time, because you fiddle with words that are broadcast to the whole goddamn globe.
You’re bored because you’re smart and you know the globe doesn’t give a shit about you and your dumb words. This other kid, though, at the coffee place? He’s somehow adopted the corporate script without being tormented by it, possibly because he’s being ironic (and hiding it completely, which, no) or possibly because he doesn’t have too many neurons firing away in his pea brain. Or maybe he’s the healthiest whippersnapper in the whole wide world, and if you plopped him down at TGIFriday’s, he’d ask you “How is everything tasting?” in a way that made you feel like he just gently sodomized you with a fried mozzarella stick.
It’s very normal to feel insanely, torturously dissatisfied when you’re in your 20s. You’ve only been out there in the world, ripped from the fairytale womb of private college, for two years now. You’re in shock, but it sometimes seems like the world still wants to know: What do you want to do with the rest of your life? Asking someone fresh out of the luxurious, grassy, boozy microcosm of a private university to map out their career plans is like asking a toddler to run a marathon while analyzing Lacan.
What you really need when you graduate from college is recovery time — time to look at the world around you and decide it’s not hideous and awful. A good friend of mine moved to Prague for two years. These days, maybe she would’ve gone to Berlin. There aren’t many other times in your life when you can drop everything and have an adventure. That said, your ambitious, color-coding ways probably aren’t all that amenable to taking whatever work you can find in a city packed with drunk youngsters.
So here’s the tough part: I don’t think you should quit your job. You’re too new at this to have any sense of which aspects of your situation you don’t like. That’s how slightly older people with more experience approach the working world: they discuss the specifics that make this or that career or job right or wrong for them. Maybe you’ll figure out that you dislike offices and should work from home if you can. Maybe you hate the news cycle itself and therefore hate being wrapped up in the trivial urgencies therein. There are people, after all — interesting, smart, dynamic people (and also, pudwhackers) — who love that shit. Maybe you’re not one of them. Or maybe you just don’t like punching the clock. All of this talk of color-coded folders indicates to me that your detail-oriented, independent personality might be better suited to a career where you manage and dictate your daily work. Maybe there’s a job for you that’s still in the news, but it’s more task-oriented rather than simply a matter of showing up and then being knocked over by a constant tidal wave of work that never ceases.
Personally, I like to cross shit off my list. I like to perform a task, feel proud of what I did, and then relax a little before I start the next task. Warming a chair, sitting through meetings, and waiting for the next wave of too-busy to hit? Torture. My writing suffers. I feel like I’m wasting my life. And personally, I hate to feel like the people around me (and above me, and below me) can’t be bothered to distinguish between good work and shit. I hate to feel like I’m not doing enough simply because “enough” has just been redefined as “not enough” by some third party who isn’t paying any attention to the quality of my work. I have a serious allergy to those Dilbert moments when you realize you’re struggling to satisfy idiotic, inefficient, arbitrary notions of what’s valuable and what isn’t.
Maybe you agree with me on this front. Maybe every person alive does. Just don’t talk about this shit openly with anyone but your cat. I can do it because I’m a professional shut-in, and I deliver clean copy, on time, without complaint*, and then money arrives in the mail and I spend it, like everyone else in LA, on water, electricity, and tequila.
When you’re older and you’ve worked for a while, you know how to do things and you know what you can and can’t live with. You also know that merely stating the obvious about how wildly dysfunctional and obnoxious and tedious and stupid most offices environments are, or merely outlining your desires and wishes in order to have healthy boundaries in a sea of boundaryless, passive-aggressive conflict, will get you pegged as a troublemaker. Offices don’t want honest, proactive square pegs walking around, making noise about more efficient ways of doing things. They want passive-aggressive, bullshitty round pegs that will fit neatly into arbitrary, inefficient, “team-oriented” round-hole roles. They want people who will ask you about your special fucking plans for the day without the slightest trace of irony. They don’t mind if those people sound like Charles Manson when they do it.
That said, though, if you can go with the flow and laugh off the Dilbertian dipshits around you, you could wind up with a really great job that you love in spite of inherent environmental stupidities.
But quitting your job right now, when you don’t know why you feel the way you do, will probably only make you more depressed. Instead, make a timeline. One or two years of this, and then if you’re still unhappy, you move on. By making a commitment to at least one more year at this job, you’ll eliminate this daily feeling of “Should I quit or not?” — which only makes every second at your job feel like torture. Instead, you need to sit down and come up with a clear plan for what you want to gain from this year. Your life needs a feeling of forward motion that it lacks right now. Most lives need this. You need to get more information about your dream job, and investigate whether or not it would feel more engaging and satisfying to you. Do some research, talk to people, read about that industry, immerse yourself in it. Spend a half hour every day on that goal, and that alone will improve your outlook. You require a combination of commitment and optimism. If the dream job isn’t for you, then write down 3 other possibilities and research those.
Don’t just sit there and sulk. Get information. Force yourself to reach out to people who do these jobs. Get some sense of what kind of environment you want, what kinds of tasks make you happy, what sorts of jobs might offer the variety that you crave. (While you’re at it, pay close attention to the stuff you love at your job, and the stuff you hate. Can you do more stuff you love and less you hate? Can you tweak your job responsibilities or hours so the job feels less oppressive?)
Above all, remember that life in your 20s can be pretty primitive. You work and you socialize and sometimes that’s all there’s time for. Maybe you haven’t met the right friends yet, or you’re not sure how you want to spend your free time, so you feel weird and depressed when you’re at home in your apartment, and there’s a clock ticking down until your next shitty work day.
That clock-ticking-down followed by clock-watching pattern drove me to work from home. I always have assignments hanging over my head, to be sure, but the variety, the flexibility, the task-oriented nature of my work, and the total lack of meetings in my life add up to what I’d consider a pretty great career. It took me years of working full-time from home, sometimes in a weird vacuum of human contact, to get to a place where I understood how to manage it well. I only bring this up because you’re someone who loves variety and crossing off tasks one by one, and you might eventually consider a freelance or entrepreneurial path.
The bottom line is this: Careers are difficult, obnoxious, non-dreamy things when you’re young. The words “dream” and “job” never actually go together unless you luck into something incredible or carefully fine-tune your career for about a decade. There are always compromises. And when you’re very young, you just have no idea what level of boredom and angst is normal. I’m here to tell you that an enormous amount of boredom and angst are normal at first. I had a dream job when I was 26, writing obnoxious cartoons for a website, and I still felt oppressed. It’s impossible not to be an ingrate when you’re your age, so don’t fault yourself for it.
Because it’s not just your job that needs to evolve. Your whole life is just this rudimentary, misshapen thing right now. You don’t know what you want, not at all. You just can’t know yet. Try to resist the urge to beat yourself up over your boredom, and try to turn off your bad brain and tolerate the unknowns.
This is my very best advice for anyone with a habit of letting their Bad Head take over their day: Do not allow the same crappy thought patterns to wear the same terrible grooves in your brain over and over again. The less you do it, the easier it’ll be to avoid in the future. Vow to push negative thoughts out of your head in the morning. Say to yourself, “I’m not waking up with a head full of shit anymore.” And get up. Clear your mind. Exercise. Appreciate your coffee. Take in the scenery. Enjoy your bagel. Sit up straight and listen to some good music while you work.
After work, break out the color-coded folders and fill them with your dreams. That’s your special plan for the day, every day. Just remember, there’s no rush. You have time to proceed slowly and meticulously. Believe in what you’re building, and form it into a kind of a religion. Use it to bring optimism into your life.
You don’t have to achieve your dreams anytime soon. You just have to keep them in mind, and not let go of them. You’re bored for a very good reason, trust me. Just stay positive, and keep facing forward. Things will get better and better, trust me. And one day you’ll look back and say, “Well, I paid my dues. I’m glad I didn’t quit. I learned a lot, and I would never have gotten here without being there first.” This job will seem vaguely romantic to you fifteen years from now. I know that’s hard to believe, but if Aaron Sorkin can work that magic, so can you.
Polly
Hi Polly,
I’ve been seriously depressed for the past few years, but have only realized it lately. I might even be manic depressive, as I have bouts of extreme happiness and really painful lows, but I’m unfortunately recently unemployed and unable to see a therapist for treatment due to how expensive it is (I’m 26, so I’m insurance-less).
This feeling could be situational, but I often find myself feeling sorry for myself and seeking validation from others to feel better about it — and then feeling even worse about myself for doing so. Here’s my situation, by the way: in the past 3 years, my mom has died, my best friend was in a debilitating car accident that left her vegetative, my younger brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and, yes, I just lost my job (my company laid off almost everyone in my division).
But, again: people I know have gone through a lot worse and in general are in terrible situations, every single day, and they’re doing just fine. Despite all of that, I’m healthy, I’m young, I have a family who loves me, and I’ve recently entered a relationship with someone who’s kind, smart, and super supportive. All of these things are things people would kill to have, so I’m trying to be grateful (and most days, I am).
I’m really tired of feeling sorry for myself. Every time I get upset about things or cry about what’s wrong, I feel like I’m showing signs of weakness or being ungrateful for what I have, and I want nothing more than to pick myself up, go find an awesome job, and start seeing a therapist so I can finally be OK. I want to feel confident and have a sense of direction and purpose. I also want to have the confidence to kick asshole friends to the curb who only fuel my negativity and self-consciousness.
The problem is, all of this melancholy “woe is me” bullshit is clouding my vision so much that I can’t even start trying to find what that job is. My motivation is sapped. Even when I have job interviews, I’m so painfully self-conscious and anxious I end up blowing them because I want it so badly. And the rejection (which I know I shouldn’t take personally, at all, ever) makes my mood even worse. I end up becoming so daunted by any sort of professional opportunity (“They’d never want to work with me”) that I don’t even try.
I’ve been a journalist before; I’ve been doing nebulous creative work over the past few years (social media, web & graphic design) to pay the bills. I get a lot of joy out of doing it to help people (I work pro bono for a few organizations in New York, where I live. I moved here so I didn’t have to drive, BTW. See story about friend above.) I don’t think I’m some creative genius, nor am I privileged millennial who’s “special” and thus deserves special treatment. I’m not the “voice of this generation,” I don’t want to be someone famous. But I do think I’m worthy of doing something professionally fulfilling that makes me happy, like every person on the planet (if they’re very, very lucky).
I have no idea what that is, and I don’t know how to “fix” myself and find out (no one really does, right?). How did you get to where you are now, and do you have any advice for getting over this slump?
Trying
Dear Trying,
Death is the subject of countless pages of poetry, literature, philosophy, you name it. Death is a worldwide obsession. Why? Because we, as human beings, cannot fucking handle death. We can’t grasp it, we can’t make peace with it, we can’t face it down, we can’t accept it, we can’t understand it. If you meet someone who says they accept the inevitability of death? If they’re not terminally ill and they don’t answer to the name “Dalai,” they’re full of it.
Three years is not a long time to deal with such enormous losses in your life. The first time I sat down with a therapist, I said I felt depressed and confused and then mentioned IN PASSING that my father had died two years earlier, but that shouldn’t really be a factor anymore. My therapist laughed at that. Two years seemed like an eternity to me. But what had I been doing all that time? I spent two months at home, crying, and then I moved back to SF and I got really, really busy and refused to think about anything heavy for a long time.
But when I moved to LA two years later and I wasn’t surrounded by friends and nightly drinks and a hectic job, I fell to pieces. I couldn’t get motivated to do anything and I pushed everyone away and my life slowed ground to a halt. I would lay on my bed and listen to the birds chirping outside and there was no one to talk to about it and nothing to be done. I’d try to write a song and it would start well and then I’d wonder what the fuck the point was.
And at the time, I didn’t have half of the challenges you’re facing.
In the old days, who would you call when you felt this bad? I bet you’d call your best friend or your mom. Now they’re both gone. Three years have gone by, and maybe you’ve been busy. Now you’re not that busy anymore. Maybe, even though you say you’re moping around all the time, maybe you haven’t actually allowed yourself to experience the full impact those traumas. Maybe you hoped that your friend would recover a little more than she has. Maybe you had a ton of other shit going on when your mom died — you were a recent college graduate, or just graduating, or you were just moving to a new city and had a busy job. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is: You have to back up and feel the crushing sadness of what you’ve lost. Your body and soul are telling you, “We aren’t moving forward until you feel this.”
That probably sounds a little morbid and unnecessary. But in blocking off the bad feeling, you’re blocking off the good feeling, too. Mourning can be one of the most enriching, vivid things you ever do, if you lean into it fully. There’s a feeling of joy that eventually arises, hand in hand with this hideously sick feeling of loss. You can feel devastated but also so thankful to be alive at the same time. But only when you’re not trying to protect yourself from the full brunt of your loss.
In therapy, it might take months to arrive here. In some ways, writing this column is rough because I’m forced to speed things up and condense what should be a long process into a few paragraphs. But look: You need to give yourself permission to feel your fucking feelings. You called your feelings “woe is me melancholy bullshit,” which is exactly how I would’ve described my feelings about my dad dying, back when I was trying to speed through the pain and accept it and move on. I was absolutely merciless with myself. I walked around all day thinking, “OH MY GOD GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER YOU SELF-PITYING LOSER.”
You cannot surge forward and conquer the world when you have a coach in your head that sounds like a sadistic drill sergeant. You have to give yourself a break.
So here’s what I’d do: First, go get health insurance with a high deductible. You must do this even when you’re young, unemployed and broke. It’s just mandatory. I know it’s insanely expensive. You have to consider it a form of rent and deal with it. You must have a safety net if you get sick or have an accident.
Then, you have to get a therapist. The fact that you’re living in a place where you don’t have to drive because of what happened to your friend tells me that you’re deeply traumatized and anxious over this loss. You MUST talk to someone about where you are right now and let it out. You need to discuss your fears and phobias and your anxiety. You need to stare into the inky blackness in the presence of a professional. You need to look closely at the ways you’ve shut down, retreated to safety, hidden from the world, in the wake of these giant traumas. It does not take a lot of initiative to do this. Just do it.
After a big trauma, it’s common to make your world smaller and smaller, pushing people away, becoming more solitary — all without really noticing it. It may be that you want to feel safe, and feel loved, that is all. After my dad died, I didn’t want anything else. When you’re in hiding, it’s really hard to bust out there and find a job. It’s hard to wake up in the morning.
So give yourself a week off the job search, find a cheap therapist. Show yourself some compassion. Your body and soul are telling you: “Fuck no. I’m not moving. I don’t want anything. I will not do work for you. I will not be ambitious. I will not be anything.”
All you need to do that first week is exercise one hour a day, sleep 8 hours, and talk to your friends (not just your boyfriend) at least once a day. Be kind to yourself. Listen to the voice in your head. Does it tell you you’re a lazy ungrateful loser who should be over all of this by now? You are now officially allowed to feel whatever you feel, whenever you feel it.
After your week off, I want you to look for a job you know that you can get, and I want you to get it. Not the ideal job, necessarily. Just a job. A temp job, if necessary. You need structure. Continue to see a therapist, exercise, talk to friends, feel things.
After a while, you can start to follow the advice I gave to LW1: Slowly examine what you want to do with your life. Research. Work hard. Write it out. Maybe you are the voice of your generation. Maybe you will be famous. Do not write off big dreams just because they make you sound foolish. Promise me right now you’ll never, ever do that again.
It’s not entitled and silly to have dreams. It’s part of what makes life worth living.
It’s not indulgent and sick to feel sad. It’s part of what makes life worth living.
You are not a fucking robot. You are all energy and emotion and raw potential. You are a beautiful, divine being, full of incredible possibilities, full of promise, full of terror and pain. Don’t be half a person. That’s what all of this turmoil is telling you: Stop hiding. Stand up, and open your eyes wide, and see how much more you might gain, and how much more you might lose. Look straight into the unknown. You have to feel everything, the joy, the fear, the blinding heartbreak. Calm yourself, breathe in slowly, and open your eyes wide. You are still here.
Polly
Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl’s existential advice columnist. She’s also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses. Photo of Radio-Canada’s Montréal newsroom by Jason Paris. San Juan graveyard photo by Timothy J Carroll.