find a job that makes me happy

Maybe I’ll sit on this one a while…

This is kinda coppied from my ‘find a job i’m passionate about’ entry. but i don’t see them as the same thing. i could be happy in a job where it doesn’t really give me much satisfaction but i don’t hate it, and it allows me to do other things i feel are important…

The first job I had worth mentioning was maths tutoring for an agency where you had about 20 kids there at once. This was fulfilling, but I always felt a bit of a fraud because I didn’t think my maths was up to scratch (partly this was just my own paranoia though). It was never going to be full time or well enough paid to be a career though, it was just a part time job while I was studying.

After doing honours I did some contract work in the lab doing medical research. I could have been passionate about that but for a few things. One is that the experiments on mice made me feel sick, I couldn’t keep that up. The other is that you had to kill yourself to get any kind of results, and it could take years before you find out the most basic of things, decades before anything meaningful. You could work your whole life on finding a cure for something and never get there.

I then took some time out and joined the public service. The hours are easier and you find that it doesn’t take as long to reach your goals, and I don’t feel a fraud because it seems like nobody really knows what they are doing. The work is all on topics that interest me and I think really matter – but that is just the problem, I am working on things that i really care about, but I feel completely impotent to do anything about them. I have absolutely no autonomy, and it feels like everything we do is just to make the minister look good. I have the opposite of passion for this kind of work. I’ve been here for 2 1/2 years and have tried moving around a bit to see if it’s just the area I’m in.

And in fact, during this time, I spent 6 months working for a science centre that was under my department. I loved working there, I thought they had a great organisational culture, and really achieved their aims and did good stuff. The problem was, it was only temporary and I had to come back to regular public service work.

I may well spend my life moving from job to job, but I prefer this to the idea of being stuck in something that eats away at my soul.