How Writing Has Destroyed My Day Job Satisfaction, And Why I Couldn’t Be Happier
By: Jon Peters
Tags: Writing, Self Improvement, Happiness, Work

How Writing Has Destroyed My Day Job Satisfaction, And Why I Couldn’t Be Happier

How writing transformed my day job from something I loved, into something that I do.

job satisfaction

noun

1. the feeling of pleasure and achievement that you experience in your job when you know that your work is worth doing, or the degree to which your work gives you this feeling.

If you’d asked me a year ago whether or not my job gave me a sense of pleasure and achievement, I would have said yes. Resoundingly and unequivocally, yes. I’d been in my new job role for about a month and was still finding my feet, but god damn did I enjoy it. It was different to anything I’d ever done before and it was a fantastic opportunity to challenge myself, develop new skills to help with progression opportunities in the future.

My wife and I separated shortly before I changed jobs. Desperate to distract myself from the upheaval in my personal life, I threw myself into my work, completely and utterly. If I wasn’t at work then I was eating, sleeping, or at home wasting time until I had to go to work again. If I had to describe it in one word, it would be existing. I was merely drifting through the motions of life without really living and feeling much joy. I wasn’t eating properly, I slept more than was good for me and I generally neglected my well-being, both physical and mental. The only real positive I had in my life was work, so that’s where my efforts went. It was the only thing that was keeping my mind occupied, but I knew that I needed to find something to keep me busy for the 128 hours a week that I didn’t spend at work:

I tried running. Turns out, Mo Farah I am not.

I tried the gym. No luck here either. I’m not about that gain life, apparently.

I tried learning Spanish. Lo siento. No hablo español.

I tried learning new skills. I learned to cook, but nothing else really engaged me.

I tried what felt like everything.

Everything except writing, which is something I had stopped a few years ago after a failed attempt at starting a gaming blog. I had spent hours creating what I thought was really good content, designing my own website, coming up with a catchy name, I thought it had all the ingredients of success. But as it turns out, the internet is saturated with gaming blogs, and trying to get mine noticed seemed like a futile effort. There’s something so demotivating about putting your heart and soul into something, only for to be smacked in the face by the realisation that nobody is reading it. I wasn’t mentally prepared for the failure at the time, it hit me hard and eventually I stopped posting.

Looking back I understand that all the reasons I’ve just listed that stopped me writing my blog, weren’t reasons. They were excuses. I was too busy making excuses to cover up my lack of determination to succeed. At the time I thought that the feeling of failure would be worse than the feeling of never having really tried, so I stopped writing entirely.

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all — in which case, you fail by default. — J. K. Rowling

Until a week ago that is. This post, an article I’ve written where I question whether having children is morally right given the state of the world, is my first attempt at writing in two years. It took around four or five hours to write, and I loved every second of it. I’d forgotten how liberating it is, the feeling of having words flow from your fingertips, the page a blank canvas for my words, my story. I wrote that article, not for claps or for follows, but for me. I wrote it knowing that nobody may ever read it, and that it may end up on the rubbish pile of the internet, with the click-bait articles and lists of “13 Potatoes that look like Channing Tatum”(yes, unfortunately that is a real article).I wrote it anyway, and whether it or any of my writing in the future gets 1 view or 10,000, I will continue to write, because I have rediscovered what it is I love to do, and the reason I do it.

Two out of three posts I have published in the past week have been distributed by Medium curators, and both have reached 200 views. Now that may not sound like a lot to some of you, but for someone’s whose expectations were lower than low, I feel like I’ve just won an Olympic Gold. 200 views on a single post is more than my blog had in the first month of writing. Scrap that, I’ve just won three Olympic Golds. A post on my personal experiences with social media addiction caught the attention of an editor at The Startup, the second largest publication on Medium which has over 450,000 followers. Move over Michael Phelps. The Startup asked if I’d like to submit my article for publication. Here’s a photo of me as I read that particular message: