Resentment

as yr know - i k-hate charvers - especially the fckhd who wanted spare change on the metty - wearing clothage thrice the cost of my ensemble and smerkin - fckff fakybggrs

k-classick line from charver prtty thief caught by cops. "aaaa waz only doin' it t feed meee fukn family maaaan" (trans. I spent the money on poor quality marijuana and carlsberg special brew) Charvers ripped off my emu emax2 sampler. Fuckers.

After the freaking Mgs of abuse I had to endure for one little remark slagging off office workers WHILE I STILL WAS ONE (therefore rightfully able to complain) ... I now feel the need to stand up for the Trustafarians and the Leisure Class. Fuck you. You don't know how hard it is being posh and not doing a damned thing all day!

I know where Dave Q lives, and I think he seriously over-estimates the number of people living by their wits (ie crime).

The lyrics to "Found a Job" reflect my sentiments completely - about a constantly arguing couple who find that their new employment brings them closer together by giving them a common sense of direction and purpose. And like Mr.Byrne says at the end "If your job isn't what you love, then something isn't right".

Pah! The US practically invented trust funds.

I know one trust-fund baby. She's in grad school, volunteers a lot and is training to be a yoga instructor. Definitely no laziness or decadence there.

I am a lurker so I'm posting this at my own risk. I have a job that I've grown to hate in a town I've realized I can't stand. The job and the move were entirely my decisions, so I know I don't have much business being resentful of the situation as I am. (Job requires extremely long and difficult hours with little hope of upward mobility, but even these things I knew beforehand.) I know the only thing that makes sense is to find a new job, but that's obviously easier said, and doesn't change the fact that almost every hour of the day I'm faced with streets, individuals, and work assignments that inspire feelings of uncontrollable disgust. (The individuals partly because they seem to be coping better than I am - immature and shameful of me, I know, but so is resenting something you've brought upon yourself.) For various reasons, I can't think about quitting for a while, and even then there are big risks involved in doing so. Which makes it easier to just sit here and seethe. And post in internet forums. Help? Any chance someone can tell me how to become one of those people who gets up and does something smart and pragmatic like try to make the best of things?

Your basic problem is known in philosophy as Buridan's Ass. Your are caught between two equally forceful aversions: to losing your present source of income and keeping your present source of income. That is why it feels intolerable. In Buridan's formulation of the problem, the ass fails to solve his dilemma and dies, but you are smart and capable and will not die of this problem. Because you know that you have more than two choices, right?

What most likely is freezing up your will to act is that any third choice other than staying or quitting involves far more complications, plans, decisions, and far more risk and uncertainty than your two dead simple choices: go to work today or quit today. Unless you want to wind up dead as Buridan's Ass, you're just going to have to deal with that.

Good luck.

Yeah. And the theoretical third option, even if it didn't involve a lot of planning or immediate risks, might wind up being just as terrible as the first (which, I suppose, is always a risk of the third option anyway), and then I'd find myself back in the same position. You'd think I'd at least have some optimism about eventually finding a preferable alternative, but I don't have that, partly because of a sneaking suspicion that I have not mentioned: that I (with my incurable negativity and resentment) am the corrupting factor in all of this, and would make any alternative insufferable in the end. I guess "you're just going to have to deal with that" pretty much sums it up.

Some alternatives you might consider (all of them carrying some risk):

Think hard about whether the expectations of your employer are in line with reason and industry standards. If they are not, discuss modifications with your superior in order to alleviate some of your resentment.

Look for other work even as you keep your present job.

Evaluate whether your feelings of resentment have a source apart from your job, and if so, work to alleviate those feelings apart from changing your job. The feelings to evaluate should include your level of comfort with risk, and whatever specific aspect of your job you most hate and why. Don't stop until you recall pivotal experiences that your feelings are founded on.

Etc.

It's complicated, but the nature of the field is such that my employers don't really need to conform to (externally-imposed) standards - they create them. I and others have tried to discuss modifications with them, which met with a lot of pleasant nodding, but no changes have been made and I don't expect them to be. (Partly because a lot of the desired changes revolve around very fundamental things like workload, work distribution, and chances for mobility, as opposed to, say, social environment.) As I've implied, I know for a fact that other employees are experiencing acute anxiety, but they seem ultimately to want the job more than I do.

Do plan on looking for other things, but it will be very hard with the lack of time. I am also not qualified to do much but don't feel like I could justify leaving the job for just anything.

Yes, I need to think in a more productive way about all of these things. For starters, there is the extreme stress, which does not seem proportional to the eventual gains. (I'm not normally a person who thinks much about the eventual payoff of things, but these rates of anxiety have lately forced me to.) As stressful and unhealthy as the environment can be, the day-to-day work involves skills I possess and challenges I excel in that would be hard to make use of/encounter elsewhere. My proficiency in them is part of the reason that the job, while I dislike it, is tied up with my sense of self-worth. I imagine myself quitting and, 20 years down the road, having nothing to "show for myself." What leads me to believe I might be a resentful person apart from all of these things is that I find myself irrationally hating people for not being as negative as I am about the whole thing. It's less that I view them as being more functional for sticking with it, and more that I feel ashamed for being the negative one.(That and I tend to assume bad things about people, which, as you've suggested, is at least partially related to experience.)

Off to take a walk and think about all of this more. Thanks.

I had a job like that (or at least i half recognise some of what you describe) for four days once. Ppl were bewildered when i quit, like 'this is how jobs work that was an amazing opportunity wtf' but i would probly have been committed at lunchtime on day 5 tbh.

yes, i have no perspective on jobs or how much i am supposed to be willing to suffer for a "good" one. or what a "good" one even is. i want to appeal to some higher authority on these questions, but i know there is none.

yeah, observing loads of other people get by just fine is.......no fuckin help at all!

this thread needn't have focused so narrowly on work imo