Sometimes my job drives me nuts, and today was one of those days. There are parts of my job that are wonderful and that I love, and there are other parts that are monotonous, and that balance seems pretty normal to me. The thing that can sometimes really get to me is the culture of the greater organization within which my job is embedded. I read a great post this morning about exactly this, as related to the FIRE movement, which argues that people don’t always hate the work they do in their jobs, they might just hate the environment that work is wrapped in. This environment consists of things like commuting long distances, office politics, sitting in the same place for 8 hours per day no matter what, and all the nonsense that comes along with your average job. This article gave me all the feels.
This is exactly how I feel about my job. There are wonderful parts of my job: I love working with clients, learning new things like the new science of psychology and techniques for creating positive change in clinical work. I hate the office politics, the endless over-tasking, the never-enough resources for the projects they decide to take on, etc. When those elements of the job rear their ugly head, I have recently taken to trying to focus my frustration into financial gain. The last time I was especially irritated by office politics, I looked at my budget and found 100$ that was allocated to semi-optional items (like spending money) and moved it into my retirement accounts. Somehow, moving money into my retirement accounts, or taking time to plan for my future financial empowerment makes me feel better about the nonsense I have to deal with now.
Since today was another one of those days, I’m going to take some time now to look at my investment & student loan repayment plans for 2019 and see if I can find ways to make them more aggressive.
How do you manage the stresses of your job?
As always, thank you for reading,
Debt Dummy
