Hi all,
At wits end with my current job and feel chronically guilty about hating it. We're in a cost of living crisis and I'm well paid compared to my peers. I work from home most days. It's a 40hr/week gig and I rarely work overtime. From the outside my life probably looks fairly comfortable.
But I hate it. My job is in investment. I ended up here somewhat accidentally as working in the labs pays a poverty wage in my country and is super demanding. Finance let me use some of my knowledge from my degrees but in a job that pays me a livable wage.
There are some good folks in the mix. There are also some horrid folks in the mix who are emblematic of everything wrong with the world of investment. Most of the externals I work with are on obscene remuneration packages. Mine is good for my age, but not obscene like theirs. I feel disconnected from reality working with these people. Internally at work, my job after meeting these folks is mostly to write papers about it. I endlessly write paper after paper after paper. Oftentimes, I am rewriting papers I already wrote but in a different voice so that one of X different stakeholders can read it slightly easier. My bosses job seems to basically be to tell me how iteration 10 of any given paper needs trivially tweaking in however many different ways before sending it out. I tweak it, he returns it with more tweak requests. Repeat ad nauseum.
My team is not close knit at all. Folks barely talk, and when we're forced into a room together there's no chemistry. Everyone is just thinking about the papers they need to write. My boss will often start arguing with folks openly in these meetings, constantly speaks over others and then gets angry when the same behaviour is returned to him. He argues in bad faith constantly and is unwilling to listen to the views of others, even if they are well evidenced.
I have plenty of hobbies outside of work and make sure to give time to each. I play lots of music, I do coding and indie game development, play videogames with my partner, etc. I feel like I can never gain as much energy from those things as work takes from me.
All of this is to say – how do people do this for 30+ years? I'm half a decade into this career and I'm losing myself in it. I'm well paid, I don't work overtime often, I work from home – this should be easy and yet I can feel my soul slowly bleeding out day after day in this role. I feel guilty that I hate this so much when I feel like I have it 'easy'. It feels meaningless and like some sort of joke that my colleagues take it so seriously because I just can't. I just can't find it in myself to care about it anymore when the work is so arbitrarily tedious.
Folks – has anyone else here had a similar experience? What did you do? How did you get out?
Cheers. Thanks for reading my unstructured stream of consciousness.