Why are we not happy when we have free fruit?
The boss of a friend recently gathered all his charges together for a ritual new year pep talk. “Each of you has the right to love your job,” he told them. She thought this terrific and looked a bit dashed when I pointed out it was both dangerous and unrealistic. No one has the right to love their jobs. Not only that, most people hate them.
If you type into Google “my job is —” the search engine predicts the way your sentence is going: “so boring” or “making me suicidal” or “making me miserable”. If you start “my boss is —”, Google offers: “lazy”, “bullying me” or (my favourite) “a cow”. Even more alarming, if you type “my job is stimulating”, it assumes you have made a typo and suggests you must have meant “not stimulating”.
The internet has a way of whipping up bad feeling. Yet in this case workplace disaffection is real and growing. We are in the middle of what Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a professor at UCL, calls an “epidemic of disengagement”. Most surveys show less than a third of workers care for their jobs, and the trend is getting worse. In the UK there is some evidence we like our jobs a good deal less than we did in the 1960s.
This is most peculiar. I was not in the workforce in the 1960s. But I was in the 1980s, and can confirm things are better than they were back then. When I joined the City pre-Big Bang, it was stuffed with upperclass men in pinstripes, many of whom were astonishingly dim. Jobs were still for life, so if you landed one you did not like, you were trapped. Promotions took ages, and even then were largely based on Buggins’ turn and who you played golf with. Bullying was so normal no one thought to complain. Office buildings were dingy and dirty. There were no ergonomic chairs and you were likely to get lung cancer from all the passive smoking.
Now, not only are offices bright and beautiful, we do not even have to go to them — we can work at home instead. Bosses have been taught not to shout. There are gyms and free fruit. And if you happen to be a woman, things have improved beyond recognition. In the 1960s you were limited to filing and shorthand, while now (at least in theory) you can run the show. So why are we so miserable?
The most common reason is having a bad manager. But this is a puzzle as managers are surely less hopeless now than they were half a century ago. All those MBA degrees, mentoring, coaching and training — none of which existed 50 years ago — cannot have been entirely in vain. Part of our modern disaffection might be due to job hopping. Because we can leave at the drop of a hat, we are less likely to make a go of wherever we are.
But the biggest reason for unhappiness is that we expect too much. Office jobs may have improved, but our expectations have far outstripped them. Better education has not helped. People with university degrees tend to dislike their jobs more than people without them. And so as more people have degrees, unhappiness rises. As we march up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it is harder to enjoy the view from the top.
When everyone is claiming to feel passion or to have found meaning, or when managers say you have a right to love what you do, it is only natural — at the smallest hint of boredom or after a minor run-in with a manager — to conclude your job makes you suicidal and your boss is a cow. /©