Help I Hate My Job

TO: LOGAN
FROM: LAURA
SUBJECT: HELP

I hate my job. I know everyone hates their job, but I hate mine in a way that is making it really, really hard for me to keep doing it. I think about quitting everyday. I have fantasies of walking up to my boss, saying, I quit, and then leaving and feeling so good. Actually it’s more like sending an email saying I quit. But it’s absolutely not an option. I have no savings. I have bills. I have so many bills. I need this job. Get another job, I know. I know. But I hate this one so much and I’m so bad at it now, on account of hating it so much, that I cannot physically or emotionally fathom applying for and getting another job. Just reading through job posting ads makes me feel like I’ll never be able to do anything ever again, and maybe I’m just stuck here forever. But what if I did just quit, wouldn’t it have to work out?

TO: LAURA
FROM: LOGAN
SUBJECT: RE: HELP

Hi Laura. I’m sorry you hate your job. And I’m sorry you don’t have a trust fund that would allow you to send that “I quit” email and then just chill on a beach for awhile. That’s one thing I’ve learned from talking to people with trust funds. Money as freedom.

But you don’t have a trust fund. Me either.

Still that didn’t stop me from quitting a job without having another job when I felt like I couldn’t take it one more second. But I had the second best thing to a trust fund: generous parents who I know would not let me fail. I knew that, worst case scenario, I could go home. I knew that, worst case scenario, my parents would pay my car payment until I got a new job. I didn’t talk to them about these assumptions before I quit my job. Maybe if I had, I would have realized that yes, these things would be done, but no one would be happy about it.

I quit a job without having another job because I thought everything would work out, and it did work out, because things always work out — there’s no other way for them to work — but it put my life on something of a course of chaos that could have and should have been avoided. I got rid of most of my stuff. I took advantage of the generosity of friends for too long. I took advantage of the generosity of my parents for too long, and our relationship suffered for it. I started to live off of credit cards and continued a years-long pattern of buying to feel good today and worrying about it “later.”

Quitting the job fixed the problem of hating that job, but didn’t fix the other problems in my life, mainly: That I didn’t have any money, that I was already racking up debt, that I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up, that I didn’t know who I was.

So: Quitting your job won’t fix your life. I think that’s the first thing to accept. It’s a bummer because you’ve been banking on this one thing being the key of it all, but it’s not. There’s no perfect job. You’ll hate your next job, too, sometimes. That’s a drag but it’s an important drag to accept because I think it’ll help you apply to other jobs. No job is going to be perfect. You won’t be perfect at any job. But a new job will be different than this job, and in being different, will be better. Different is better. That’s your mantra for now. Different is better. Maybe this job has some perks, besides the fact that you hate it. That’s nice. Perks are nice! But there’s no column A and column B for you right now. There’s just different.

As far as how to keep on keeping on while you find this different job: You’re already doing it, keep doing it. Apply to jobs. Apply to lots of jobs. I’m not going to give you a step by step plan, you know how to do this. You got this job and you can get another job. That’s the goal right now: Another job. A different job. Different is better. Don’t quit your job until you have another job. Don’t get fired until you have another job. Decide the bare minimum you need to do to not get fired and do that. Hold yourself to it. Do your job, and apply for other jobs. You’ll be out of there in less than a year. Apply for everything. Less than six months. Apply for anything. Less than three months. Get a job in a restaurant or a grocery store. Less than a month. You can do this. You just need a different job. You can find one.

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