Archivi dei tag: exhaustion

Do You Like Your Job?

You finish the chore tasks of the day in an hour and you dedicate yourself to kill the time you have left to complete your workday. You might ask your boss something more to do, but you would rather go out. If they need you, they will call you.

It sounds like an enviable plan, but as soon as you have posted something on social media, searched for the best book deals to buy, and eaten a sandwich, you wish the call would come. It does not come, and you realize that you have already become chronically bored, and you feel undervalued. It is not normal.

This type of boredom is called by specialists bore-out syndrome. According to psychologists, this boredom can be as damaging as overwork exhaustion, the best-known burnout syndrome. We tend to think that a bored employee will take the opportunity to pay more attention to performing a certain task, but this is not often the case. According to a study by the University of Lancashire (England), bored people actually perform poorly at work and make more mistakes.

Of course, to avoid getting involved in the source of their boredom, people with this syndrome tend to be distracted by social media and may even develop an addiction. Food, alcohol, and tobacco are great candidates to fill in your time.

Does it sound familiar to you?

It is important to distinguish normal, even healthy, boredom from constant and chronic boredom that ends up making you feel useless. Chronic boredom can generate profound anxiety and can negatively affect all aspects of life, from private and family life to social life.

We already know that, usually, the things that bore us are the same things that we do not like. This lowers the levels of motivation and involvement, the levels of responsibility and makes you adopt a passive attitude. You are procrastinating. However, there is more.

Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash

To begin with, know that getting bored during the working day does not depend on the type of work you do, but on the type of interests you have. You can have the best job, even be the boss, but feel deeply bored and undervalued. In other words, working on something that does not match your education or experience, and that does not allow you to develop professionally, is a time bomb. Other causes of demotivation are also lack of communication with others, carrying out monotonous tasks that do not represent any kind of challenge and having a definite contract.

All of these factors increase when you have no other choice than taking a whatever job, or you cannot afford to change your current job. The situation is getting worse in these times due to the economic downturn caused by the pandemic. People in that situation, run a much higher risk of boredom and exhaustion because they do something they know from the start that they do not like. Their only motivation is financial and over the years this becomes hard to bear. It is extremely serious because people spend about 33% of their day at work, and sometimes even more.

To limit the damages you could try finding small motivations that could be incorporated into your work. The idea would be about making each day meaningful and interesting. Communicating interest and commitment to superiors by developing new tasks could also help. Finding an exciting activity to bond downtime at work would be interesting but sometimes impossible to do. In those cases, you could, for example, move it to immediately after working hours.

If despite this, your motivation does not increase, it might be better to look for another job that best suites you, something you could do while keeping your current job. Indeed, it would not be wise to replace the anxiety generated by the lack of motivation at work with the one arising from being unemployed. You could consider a part-time job or volunteering activities if you have enough resources to live on.

What about you? Do you like your job?

Photo by Anne Nygard on Unsplash

Working Less, Could it Save the Planet?

A study by the University of Massachusetts states that “working less is good for the environment”. If we would spend 10% less of our time at work, our footprint on the earth would be reduced by 14.6%, mainly thanks to the decrease in travelling and daily expenses.

There are two contradictory theories on this idea:

  1. wages may remain unchanged and the economy would continue to grow thanks to the technological and energetic improvements despite the reduction in working time; this theory explains us that pollution could be reduced thanks to the change in daily habits, such as the preparation of your own meals at home instead of buying food already prepared or prepared by others;
  2. only by reducing wages we will achieve a significant reduction in the ecological footprint by 2050. This is the theory of degrowth that supports the fact that only with less money available the consumption of material goods can be reduced and consequently there will be a corresponding reduction of the pollution and use of resources. In practise, it means that by working four days, you would receive a salary equivalent to four days.

I would like to focus on degrowth because I support this approach. It seems clear to me that by continuing in this way the human kind will encounter a rapid depletion of available resources which will cause a sudden and uncontrollable decline of the population and of the productive capacity of the industries. The degrowth theory is certainly radical and to some it seems heretical. However, an OECD report says that consumption has increased by 50% in the past 30 years and that this goes hand in hand with an increase of the environmental footprint. The degrowth theory stipulates that a progressive decrease in consumption should begin by starting with a reduction in working time.

Serge Latouche, economist among the founding fathers of the degrowth theory, explains that degrowth does not mean weakening or suffering. It rather means transforming the concept of consumption into that of use: I buy something because I need it, if it breaks I have it repaired ( or repair it by myself) and, at the end of its lifecycle, I recycle it. It also means shifting attention from quantity to quality. The result will be a materially responsible society.

Degrowth is also a praise of slowness and duration; learning from the past; awareness that there is no progress without conservation; indifference to fashions and ephemeral; draw on the knowledge of tradition; not identifying the new with the best, the old with the outdated; do not call buyers the consumers , because the purpose of purchasing is not consumption but, as I said before, use.

So why working less and earning less? If the consumption for leisure or pleasure activities would increase thanks to a shorter working week, there would be a significant increase in the ecological footprint. This is why the reduction in working time must be accompanied by a reduction of wages. However, we would have more time for us, to dedicate to our personal growth, which does not only mean fun or leisure activities.

The crucial choice of our times, therefore, is between urgently committing ourselves to embark on the path of sobriety at all levels or going at full speed towards the depletion of resources and the global collapse of our system, which nobody hopes for.

In these difficult times, with the rapid spread of a virus that threatens our lives and frightens us, we could seriously begin to reflect on a different future for us all.

What do you think about it? Would you be willing to work less, gaining less and consuming less (but using more), thus starting a path towards a more committed society, different from the way we know it today?