How is Your Job?



John Lennon once said the following:
“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.”

Love the thought, but then reality hits you. Unless you were born into wealth, you realize that you have to work. After all, who can be happy when they are hungry or don’t have a roof over their head? And so most people end up (settle?) with jobs like Dilbert’s. Steve Jobs exhorted people to “not settle” during his famous Stanford convocation address:
“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

Which kind of leaves people with two choices if they want to be happy: keep looking until you find a job you like (even love) or stop caring about your job (just look at it as a way to pay the bills). The first approach can be frustrating and besides, there are no guarantees that you’ll find that job anyway, so most people choose the second option.

But try as hard as they can, the job still gets to them. Which is why Dilbert remains such a popular strip.

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