Can't Get No?

In part because of my own thoughts on this, in part because of posts by Ann and kstyle and their job/career-search adventures, I've been musing on job satisfaction and what it involves. I've been observing, for example, that, even though the past couple of weeks were stressful, in the sense of long hours, a lack of information, frustrating moments with coworkers, and a major deadline, the stress felt circumstantial--and temporary. There was a deadline, after all, which is bad, in the sense that one must actually get the things in on time (and apparently some grantees did not), but it also mediates the stress, in the sense that one knows there's a day when it has to stop. And, let's face it, I'm still new there--I haven't had the opportunity to burn out yet. Finally, it's actually more or less the kind of job for which I was looking: working for a nonprofit, for a good boss, with a lot of work to do. The pay could be a little higher (especially now that, having done the budgets for the grants, I know what everyone's making), but even that is certainly acceptable, and I expect my boss to go to bat for me in that regard.

However.

I am finding that I continue to compare what I'm doing to what I was doing at the bakery. On one hand, there's a certain something that came from the work at the bakery: making a product like croissants, and making them extraordinarily well (if I may be immodest here for a moment), in mass quantities, while also pitching in with multiple other products, was extremely satisfying in many, many ways. It is not something that everyone could do, as I'm sure Bossman knew then and, especially, knows now. (I need to get to the bakery or to a market to see how the current product looks.) On some level, it confirmed that my original plan wasn't completely insane, i.e., if I had managed to line things up, if Chuck hadn't flaked out, if I had found the right space, and the financing, and such, it could have worked.

Yes, that's a big pile of ifs (which, in part, is why I don't completely blame Chuck for things falling apart; any of a number of other things could have failed as well), but I see ifs like that as materially different from the ifs related to whether one is capable of doing something. (For another example, I think that I would have been a good professor--if I had been able to find a tenure-track job before I had to find some other kind of work.) We could have an argument about whether I should have stuck with either of those dreams for longer, but I don't think it's an easy or obvious call for either one.* The point here/now is that I think I mastered at least a major aspect of what it would have taken to be successful, and there's a certain amount of satisfaction in that.

But, as I whined here incessantly, it was grueling and, in some sense, pointless, at least once I realized that i wasn't going to be opening a bakery after all. On top of that, Bossman was exploiting me to some extent. Ultimately, this is what made me realize I needed to get the fuck out of there--if he had paid me even a little more an hour, I might have stuck around longer, and I think that would have been seriously unhealthy, in several dimensions. That is, no matter the very real satisfactions of the job, the dissatisfactions drove me out of it. This is non-trivial (well, okay, in the context of this blogpost it's non-trivial; in the greater scheme of things, it's pretty fucking trivial), in that I found much of the job itself to be quite satisfying. That is, if I were Ann, and I were getting to design websites, but I was being underpaid, and the job was physically grueling, with little paid time off, no room for advancement, I had to do a second job on the side because the pay was so low, and there were no benefits, would it be worth it? Everyone is going to answer that question differently, and the same person may well answer it differently at different points in his or her life.

It is also non-trivial that I'm 20 years older than Ann, and I've worked not just at several different jobs but at several different careers. That may even be the real point around which I'm circling: at this point in my life, given the things I've done, I'm reasonably content to be doing work that needs to be done, with people I like, for a good boss, at an organization that compensates me in a way that enables me to live comfortably, especially with the extra income from editing on the side. More to the point, the way I keep thinking about it--and sort of unintentionally, in that this thought keeps bubbling to the surface, rather than being something of which I remind myself--is that I have a comma in every paycheck, I can take days off without it costing me money, and I don't have to lug 50-pound sacks of flour up a flight of stairs. Those turn out to be very valuable, in ways that I might not have recognized if I hadn't spent two years at the bakery.

None of these are reasons that Ann or kstyle should NOT look for more satisfying work, mind you--I hope they both find things to do that make them happier than what they're doing now.

Anyway. My critique of Pilates will have to wait until tomorrow (I did my first session ever tonight).

One update, though: Friend apparently got a turkey yesterday morning--a 21.5-pound turkey, no less (he emailed me from the public library near the farm). Which means he didn't have to get up at 3 am to go sit in the rain today.
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*We can also have an argument about whether it was worth the more than $75,000 in loans those two things cost me--that sum in a retirement account, for example, would be nice--and we have to throw in the lost income during the seven years I was in grad school and the year of unemployment after that as major costs of this whole enterprise as well. Anyway, the cost-benefit analysis is probably all a separate post.