Thoughts on Work: The Audacity of Pursuing Happiness
This blog is titled Thoughts on Work, and oh boy, do I have them. I’ve been working, in the traditional sense, for the last 25 years. And my thoughts on work have evolved quite a bit since I first dipped my toes in the waters of the job market. We all know what kind of work culture exists in America, where I live. Those darn puritans showed up ready to hustle, and we haven’t stopped since. We’re told we have to get out there and make something of ourselves, achieve our dreams, do better than our parent’s generation, change the world, support our families, and be someone worth remembering. We’ve gotta work hard, too. No one will let us forget that work is supposed to be hard. For me, trying to live up to this ideal has been in part, motivational, and in part, miserable.
I’m not a practical person. When my friends were heading to college to study business, medicine, politics, and technology, I skipped off to a state school 3 hours away from home to study theatre. I love theatre. It makes me feel alive, passionate, connected, and for a while I couldn’t imagine myself doing anything else. Years later, when I left my life in NYC to get married and pursue a new life, I went back to school to become an archaeologist. Yes. you heard that right. I got my Master’s Degree in Anthropology and became just that, because besides theatre, I didn’t love anything else as much as I loved history and the exploration of humanity. Did I make lots of money as an actor and an archaeologist? No, of course not. Did I also bartend and wait tables and work in shops most of the time to help support myself while I was pursuing those careers? Yes, I absolutely did. But did I feel like I was working hard in order to create a career worthy of the American ideal? Yes. Regardless of the fact that I have two of the most universally agreed upon most worthless degrees in the world, I didn’t doubt myself. I kept plugging away, trusting that as long as I was happy and fulfilled with my life, that would be good enough.
Was it? As it turns out, no. Both of these jobs were extremely hard to make work with my lifestyle. I hadn’t taken into account that these fields often require you to live like a nomad in order to be successful, which I couldn’t do. There was also the pressure of not making a good enough income. I felt tremendous pressure to have a “grown up job” making over $50,000 a year. I often lost confidence because I believed myself to be viewed as unsuccessful by those around me. After having my son I decided to leave traditional archaeology and try to pivot my career into something more stable. I considered going to nursing school, which I look back on as absolute lunacy on my end. Not because nursing isn’t an incredible profession, but because in no universe have I ever wanted to be a nurse or considered myself to have the skills and interests that would make a good nurse. Eventually, I went into instructional design and online educational content creation, where I have worked for the last 6 years, a job in which I am traditionally successful, it checks all of the boxes, but comes in at a solid “meh” as far as passion and happiness go, for me.
My complicated relationship with work got me here. My culture told me to pursue my passions, live my dreams, and do something important, which I did, but it also told me that I was not successful without a specific kind of title, prestige, paycheck, or lifestyle. Believing that fallacy was what led me to abandon those pursuits and find a job that actually feels like work, for the first time in my life. I am so fortunate to have this job, and yet, I am unhappy. I don’t care about this job. Does the world really want me to spend so much of my time working at something that isn’t important to me and doesn’t make me happy? Well yes, at least America does. As it turns out, we’re more concerned with productivity than we are with happiness. We work people into the ground. We tell them to pursue their dreams but only if their dreams come with a 401K and allow them to take part in the consumerism that drives our economy.
We’ve been hearing a lot about the great resignation since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, and I understand why. My traditional job makes me feel like my life is not my own. Like I’m owned by a corporation that can tell me that I have to give them 11 hours of my day and I can’t do anything about it, and even if I wanted to I can’t just leave because I would not be able to support myself financially. Many other countries have a cheaper cost of living, value work/life balance more, treat people who work fairly, and support people who have non-traditional careers like the arts through better social programming and by valuing these things more culturally. Did you know in Norway being a professional actor is a state job? With an actual living wage and benefits. Incredible. Imagine if people who worked in creative fields didn’t also have to spend 40 hours of their week waiting tables or working as a receptionist or delivering people’s takeout in order to pay their rent.
It’s a life I have only been able to imagine. Waking up, master of my own day, in charge of how I spend my time, able to follow where inspiration leads me. Doing the things that light me up and give me that hum of alignment and excitement. But also making a good income. Allowing all of the good things I’ve been working towards to come to fruition and to support the kind of life I imagine my son and I living together. Nothing crazy or ornate, just simple, comfortable, full of creativity, inspiration, and freedom. On my terms. No one else’s.
I want time to develop ideas, I want time to see them grow, I want to write, and design, and make videos, do voice over, I want to garden, and work on projects in my house that I now own, I want what I create to help people - whether it’s through providing guidance or knowledge, or making them laugh, think, or take a moment to appreciate the good things in their life. I have a deep knowing that all of these things that I’m starting to weave into my life are leading somewhere big, and now I’m at a point in my life where I can’t deny that any longer.
And yet, I still have a full-time job. So how does that work? Well, I advocate for myself to continue working from home full-time. The gift of remote work has given me a second life and allowed the dream of leaving traditional work to be born. Now I do my job and I still do it well and with care, but I don’t kill myself to impress anyone like I used to. I take regular breaks in my day to take care of myself and do small things to move me closer to my goal of leaving my corporate job. In my off hours, I take on freelance work in the areas that I want to expand into when I live as a full time creative entrepreneur. I write books and blog articles. I design new products for my Etsy shop. I do voice over and record audiobooks. I try to come up with content that excites me for platforms like YouTube and TikTok. I do training courses on things like copywriting, UGC, and coaching to see where my creative energy wants to head in the future. Sound like a lot? It is. I’m a multipotentialite, read my blog post about it.
Some days I work until 11pm. Some days I don’t want to shut down my computer. Some days I don’t eat and the laundry doesn’t get done. Then, some days I hit the brakes and force myself to take a day off from my personal projects. I spend time in nature, I explore, I go on little adventures, and dream about the future.
So what do I think about work now? I think work should be molded around your life, not the other way around. I think I was young and brave and knew myself back in the days when I ignored the world’s expectations to become an actor and then an archaeologist. I think the more lost I got the farther I strayed from who I was and the life I was meant to live, and those were the years that I spent trying to make myself fit into someone else’s mold. I’m not mad about it, because I got myself into a field that was somewhat creative and very stable and when I was going through my divorce it allowed me to do it without fear for how I was going to pay my bills. But now I want more. I want my life to be my own and I want a life of abundance, and I’m going to get it. The amazing thing is, I’m already that person. I’ve made the changes and I’ve started the wheel rolling and every day it picks up momentum. I never want it to stop.
All of this to say that, it’s totally fine if the life I want is not the life you want or the life that’s right for you. If you want to climb the corporate ladder, if you want to work in an office, if you want to provide a service by working for a company or a restaurant or a university, I love that for you. Do it. Claim it. Create the life that’s right for you. But as I told you, I’m not a practical person. So I’ll be in my house, building JennyMcNivenCreative into a business that I am privileged enough to spend every day doing. Living in that hum, living in abundance and purpose and joy and YES.
Thanks for reading.
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