What if I told you you don’t have to love your job?
One of the first things ingrained into our young, impressionable minds was what we were going to be once we reached that mystical age of adulthood. In this way, we were raised believing in the inevitability of work, and that one day, we will have to wake up every morning and go make money so that we can live. Some of us were raised to not even consider another choice — as far as we knew, there wasn’t one. The same still holds true — perhaps more stubbornly than before.
For most of our educational careers, our decisions are driven by the effect they would have on a future career. You stay away from detention so it doesn’t go on your record. You do more extracurriculars and community service than you would really like in order to stand out in your college applications. You pay attention in class, take standardized tests and stress endlessly to ensure that you maintain the high grades you need to get into a “good” college. You work just as hard in college and join just as many clubs to get an internship and the “work experience” needed to actually work. But why is this our end goal?
What even is a “good” job? It depends on who you ask. For some, it’s one that earns you enough to live comfortably — a nice house in the suburbs, the latest electronics, enough of your favorite snacks to stock a pantry and the money to go on the occasional vacation. For others, it’s a job that they love unconditionally, regardless of the salary. Suffice to say, almost everyone has a different idea of what a good job looks like — but it is almost always related to their quality of life.
The job you have should not determine your quality of life. In fact, it shouldn’t have anything to do with it. If you think about it, the fact that we spend our entire lives preparing to work is pretty strange — that can’t be all we’re meant to do. Rather than searching for a career that makes us happy in itself, we should favor careers that allow us to do what makes us happy outside of the realm of labor.
Yes, liking your job is important because it’s something you will have to do daily — but it shouldn’t be what our happiness is dependent on. We should derive happiness from the things we hold closest to our hearts, like spending time with loved ones or finally accomplishing that one thing you’ve always wanted to do. If you want to travel, get a job with the flexibility that allows you to do that.
In trying to dispel the pattern of working soul-sucking jobs simply because they earn you an ideal salary, we have tied ourselves to this narrative that we must love our jobs completely and irrevocably, or else we will live unhappy lives. By doing so, we let corporate America determine our happiness.
In turn, we constantly worry about whether our majors or the careers we’re working towards will unrealistically be ones that we will love every single day and will never have any qualms with. In reality, it doesn’t have to be that way. We can enjoy our jobs, but if they’re not our favorite part of the day, it should be completely fine, because we should have other aspects of our lives that make us happy. This is why the concept of work-life balance is so incredibly important.
Oftentimes, when you hear the phrase “work-life balance,” you hear the voice of a jaded Gen X-er saying something along the lines of, “Kids these days want everything to be handed to them on a silver platter.” It’s not surprising coming from people whose parents found no issue with 12-year-olds in sweatshops — but it’s not as crazy a concept as they may think. Work-life balance is simply balancing your career so that you have ample time to pursue your passions and live the life you want without the burden of a 100-hour work week — for example, a job that allows you to work remotely, or a job that allows you to take time off just to recharge, or that gives more than an almost criminal 14 vacation days per year.
As USC students, we stress so much about internships and recruitment season and other blood pressure-raising career-oriented responsibilities. The USC Alumni Association, the Trojan Family and the corporate buzz terms we hear daily (like “coffee chats,” which sadly don’t even involve coffee half the time) all push students into a very career-oriented mindset. We’re far too accepting of the idea of a 100-hour investment banking internship work week, and plenty of us even seek this out, leaning on the idea that we’ll stay in the industry for “just a year or two” — then focus our attention elsewhere.
While it’s important that we take advantage of the career opportunities available to us, it’s not necessary to revolve our lives around them. In our search, we should look for opportunities that allow us to be happy human beings — outside of the hotshot corporate office.
We don’t have to unconditionally love our jobs. We should, however, love the fact that they give us the time and space to love our lives. And if that’s not the case? Just quit.