Over the last while, much has been written about workers hating their jobs and quitting in droves to seek new, more fertile pastures. Now, both the degree of dissatisfaction and the reasons for disliking their employment seem to vary according to which study one reads. We will leave it to the reader to do their own investigations. However, it might be worthwhile looking at the problem from the perspective of psychology and how it plays into the “I hate my job” crowd.
First, while our business landscape is becoming more complex and is fraught with many more pitfalls than in the past, the hard fact is that people are not becoming more effective at handling today’s business pressures. Consider the quotes of Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the USA. “When you are finished changing you are finished.” “People are divided into three classes – those who are immovable; those who can be moved and those who move.” Now, Franklin coined these phrases about 300 years ago. And those quotes are just as true today as they were then. People are not becoming better at coping or learning how to be more effective than they were three centuries ago. Regardless, the “high bar” keeps going up. And the convergence between escalating complexity and folks not psychologically growing may well have a great deal to do with people disliking their jobs. Of course, the dramatic rise in the cost of living is not helping the situation either. Folks are creating seriously unrealistic career advancement goals and expecting very high salaries with none of the typical “slogging” that is normally required. And the underlying motivation is all about coping. One wonders if people realize that Warren Buffett has made 99.7% of his money after age 52!
Even Denzel Washington, who reportedly makes $20M USD per movie, is not too far wrong when he suggests that “In any profession it gets to be a grind.”
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