maladroit4u

The Inevitability of Hating Your Job

2013-10-02

"This is great," you exclaim, "I've finally found my dream job!"

A couple of weeks later, it's your first day: working in the craft you love, on which you educated yourself for multiple years. They're really going to pay you to do something you would do for free! You love this so much you can't believe it.

Then six months later, you find yourself searching wildly for reasons to quit.

This is what happens when you follow the adage of "Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life". There is no love when you have no free will. A love forced is a love no more. I, too, loved the activity that I am now paid to do. That is, until I was paid to do it according to someone else's whims.

My hobby was programming and web development. I could stay up all night, just to build a useless site for visitors to vote on their favorite cat gif. And then I was catapulted into the "real world", where I was forced to create sites that felt useless to me so that I can eat and be sheltered. And I hate it.

Is there anyway to avoid this? Sidestep this fate of having your truly loved pastime taken and mutated into a Monday-through-Friday torture ritual? I'm starting to lose hope that there is... What do you do when you hate your job and your hobby, as they are one and the same?