This is a long rant. Thank you if you read it. I just want one person to listen to me. To take me seriously.
24F. Parents spent my entire life telling me that there would be no higher achievement in my life than getting a “real” career / office job. That women weren't even allowed to be anything but secretaries when they were growing up, so I had so much opportunity. That they chose my name so I would be respected in an office setting, that they paid for me to go to a Montessori kindergarten so I could get into an advanced high school one day, so I could go to a good college, so I could get a good job, so I could make a lot of money and live better than they did.
I graduated college with high honors and many awards, and it took me 2 years to land a job as a secretary in a field only tenuously related to what I wanted to do. I'm the youngest person on my team and I'm treated like garbage. Never once said no to any work I was given, but never once got a please or thank you for cleaning up everyone else's messes. I worked harder than anyone else, I worked longer hours than anyone except for our boss, who literally never leaves the office. I learned my job so quickly and so well they had me training our entire team on new programs and stuff, and had me taking on work from other coworkers that was out of my paygrade. I was “promoted” after four months.
“Promoted,” because, despite them making a huge deal about what an honor it was and making me grovel and thank them for weeks, it didn't come with a pay raise. I was doing at least twice the amount of work, and much harder work, for free. I asked about my raise and they said it was coming, it would just take HR a couple weeks to sort it out.
It took them 7 months, and it's only about $200 more per paycheck.
I only have two friends at the office, two guys a couple years older than me, but even they don't really respect me. They're nice to me, but you can tell when they talk to me about work they don't think I'm as smart as them or worth as much as them to the team, even though we all had the same major and one of them was hired only two weeks before I was. I've had to spend hours and hours training them on some of our software and stuff that I learned to use in 5 minutes on YouTube, at the expense of not getting my own work done, yet they still infantilize me constantly — implying I don't understand what it's like to be a real adult because I don't have a mortgage yet etc, or making a huge deal about helping me with something I didn't ask for help with.
One of them was given one of my old secretary assignments today by his manager (filing completed projects on our shared server) and got so upset and angry he immediately started talking in our group chat about transferring to another team. He couldn't even handle being treated like I am for five minutes, and I've put up with it for a year.
I'm turning 25 in two weeks, and I know I probably shouldn't put a lot of importance on the age 25. But a quarter of my life gone — if I'm lucky, because cancer runs in my family so the likelihood of it being a third of my life is high — and I have accomplished nothing meaningful with my life. I cry on my commute there at least once a week.
I try to keep up with my hobbies and see my friends, but my workload is so overwhelming that I never take lunch breaks anymore, and I frequently work from 8:30am – 10pm. I will just drive home from the office to shovel down a frozen dinner and feed my cat and maybe watch a 30m tv show episode with my boyfriend, and then it's right back onto my work laptop until I have go to sleep to do it all over again. I barely have hobbies anymore. I'm too exhausted to even play a videogame on the weekends. I just sleep, and usually I work on the weekends too, just to try to stay afloat. I'm fucking broke, but it doesn't really matter because I don't have time to go to happy hour with my friends or anything, and I would never be allowed to take more than one day of PTO in a row anyway. And if you don't log in to work on your PTO days, your manager punishes you by giving only you the really bad assignments the next week.
We also have keyloggers, screen recorders, and productivity time trackers on our work laptops, so I just have massive anxiety the entire time, knowing that if I take even a 30 minute break, someone will flag it for review.
I can't imagine a lifetime of this. I can't even imagine another five years of this, or even one more year. My work isn't even fullfilling, I hate it — we make TV ads and stuff for Big Pharma. Bayer, Pfizer, Moderna, etc; billion dollar companies who jack the prices of their cancer drugs up by 500%. Our job is to make the ads seem as educational and unbiased as possible, even though Bayer is paying us $500K to do so, to trick patients into not realizing the drug is sponsored by the company producing it. So not only am I not contributing anything to the world, I'm actively making the world worse every day. It goes against my morals, and I hate myself for working here.
But I don't have a family I can move in with, and I have a lot of student loan debt and 5 years of a car loan. I've been applying to other jobs, but I can't get an interview, and I can't afford to go back to food service — I've gone over my budget a thousand times and there is no chance I will be able to afford to pay either of my loan payments. So if I quit and go back to being a waitress, or go on unemployment while I job hunt, I'm risking my car being repossessed and the IRS taking my loan payments straight from my paycheck.
I feel like I'm drowning. I truly feel like I'm drowning.
TL;DR: 25yo has a quarter life crisis over her meaningless job giving her a meaningless life.