I don't need to tell you that workdays can be stressful.
If you're not physically exhausted, you're mentally exhausted. If you're not overtasked, you're looking at the clock every five minutes. And the sheer stupidity of office policies and politics can leave you on your last thread.
But for many of us — certainly for me — if we don't show up regularly on time to Do The Job Things, we don't get paid.
The getting paid part keeps us coming back again and again, asking for another.
Most of us can't reasonably quit our jobs
I don't hate my job by any stretch. Most days I like it. It's a good job with unusually beefy benefits, a nothing commute, and fairly interesting work.
I'm thankful for that.
But even so, I can't reasonably quit without putting myself and my family in a bad place financially.
It's a constant, low-grade niggly-naggly stress to go to a job when there are so many more appealing ways to spend a day.
My lanyard with my work badges (plural) weighs a scant three ounces. It might as well weigh twenty pounds, though, for how little I want to hang it around my neck some mornings, or for how much lighter I feel when I shed it after arriving home.
It's not doing the job that's stressful. I've gotten through each workday successfully.
What's stressful is that I can't not go to the job without nasty consequences.
On most days, I don't even really want to quit my job
As I mentioned before, most days I like my job. My colleagues are smart, entirely reasonable people who don't knowingly inflict chaos on me or others. The work serves a purpose, and other smart, entirely reasonable people in other organizations value what we do and use our products every day.
I'm well aware that my job could be far worse. I'm also aware that every job has ups and downs and that it's too much to expect any job to be ecstasy every day.
On any given workday, my job's pretty darn good. I'm sure lots of people would be more than happy to trade vocations with me.
So I'm not really in the camp of ditching the nine-to-five to solopreneur 100%. Doing that has its own stresses and I'm not even close to ready to handle that anytime soon anyway.
This is what would take away most of the job stress
It's all about creating options.
We don't need to exercise every option we have. The benefit comes from having the option in the first place.
I'd like to eventually have the option of being able to quit my job and have my family's needs covered.
And just having the option to quit in my back pocket would be enough to remove most of my job stress.
Going to work would then no longer be a necessity, and I would be in a position to call my shots.
I could go to work for as long as it's still fun. Or, conversely, I could walk when it stops being fun, and not worry.
The option to work or walk. I like that.
Working toward that option, one article at a time
Kristen Walters, a lawyer turned full-time creator, likens articles and other creative content to “tiny virtual employees” who work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
For the thousand-plus articles I've written for my main website, maybe two percent of those “tiny virtual employees” I've written do the heavy lifting. (The rest just watch cat videos all the time, I guess.) And that stands to reason, because not only did I not know what to do when I wrote the articles, it also took me a good while to learn even part of what I should do — let alone do it!
The biggest part of what I should do, and the part that I've known for the longest time, is to be consistent. I've started only recently to create on any kind of schedule.
Creating regularly, and learning how to do it better, is its own reward. Heading on a good trajectory is its own reward.
And even if I never quite end up being truly able to work or walk, just knowing that I'm making things happen is enough to take some of my job stress away.
(Header Photo by Elisa Ventur on Unsplash)
