Cuđđoolph wrote:*<]:^D wrote:to work-haters - i had a similar decision to make as i was very unhappy in my past job.
work will never be 'fun' and what you want to all the time but it can and should be rewarding/feel like you have value.
before i became a teacher i tried to think about what part of my previous job and parts of my life felt good to do for me, and decided that teaching was the best fit.
im sure this wont work for everyone but i think that mindset switch from 'work should be fun' to 'work needs to be rewarding' really helped me decide and 1.5 years in im glad i changed careers
This is happening to me right now - a realisation that I'm either not suited to or won't be happy with the sole career path currently laid out in front of me, particularly after being knocked back for a promotion a few months ago. I've sort of fallen into this as a career rather than choosing it, and I've spent a few years trying to convince myself it's something I have a passion for when it probably isn't that true - likely to avoid trying to find something I'm truly passionate about for fear it can't be shoehorned into a traditional career.
I don't think I could hack teaching as a career though, I had a friend have a breakdown over the stress it caused him.
I can relate to this feeling of, "this isn't so bad, I can get excited about this". I've tried over the years to get excited about anything I do, just so that I don't feel miserable, and it took me many months (fortunately not years) to accept (and I had to see a psychologist etc) that it was just the wrong path for me. One of the things I am best at though (web design and development), took me even longer - about 10 years - to realise I was never going to be happy doing it professionally for actual real people (other than myself) because of all the managerial constraints and market conditions, and the physical working conditions of being tied to a computer and at a beckon call for downtime or bugs/problem/updates etc 24/7. Scale that to more than a handful of clients and it would have strawberry floating sucked. I certainly don't regret being resolute, but it hasn't come without it's own problems. Running a business is one of the hardest things anyone can do, and - besides accruing fixed assets, reviews and brand value etc - I haven't really made any money. But I am not desperately sad and anxious all the time, deep down, which is no way to be.
In an ideal world, I should probably be pursuing academia in the arts, having completed a PhD by now, but it is just so expensive for the decent schools (figured out once it would cost about £40k in real terms to stay in London and study at one of the top schools I deserve to be in like RCA or Royal Academy etc, or maybe LCC for sound art stuff), I cannot afford the burden of a professional development loan or anything like that.
I saw that kind of scenario unfolding in the past and tried to think of a smooth way out of it and unfortunately there just wasn't one, I was doing 2 very different jobs at the same time so the only way was to crash out, which is very scary. It always took an outside opinion, like a doctor or a business assessment panel, to tell me the truth that I needed to hear to set me on a different course. I'd certainly recommend speaking about these things to someone impartial who isn't emotionally invested in the existing career path to help decide with you what is is you want rather than what you think you have to keep doing because that's "the way it is" (can't stand that phrase now, if anyone utters that I can't help but feel they're pretty stupid because it is just not true a lot of the time, things can be changed).