Life on the Job Treadmill

A few weeks ago I wrote about my purpose in life and I concluded that it is very work oriented and that I want to find ways to provide unique services that make a difference in people's lives. As soon as this purpose became clear to me, what also became abundantly clear is that my day job does not align with this purpose at all.

I am a software developer and that is my passion. When I talk about proving unique services, the way in which I want to do that, at least for now, is via software development of some kind. The problem with my day job is that I am not doing anything that any other developer couldn't do. If I quit my job tomorrow they would simply hire another developer to take my place. Sure I now have some knowledge of the system that I work on and that would be lost if I left, but I don't bring anything really unique to the job. I am using my talents to work on somebody else's goals towards somebody else's purpose.

At my company we develop broadcast graphics software that allows other companies to create fancy graphics for TV programs such as sports and news shows. I don't care about that. Sure it's a fairly interesting job as far as jobs go but I don't care about it in a deep way, there is no passion there, it's not something that I have created and that's the key difference.

So, I can now conclude that my day job does not move me towards my life's purpose. But does that even matter? As I said in my earlier post about purpose, for many people their purpose has nothing to do with their job at all. For many people it has a lot to do with family so their job simply provides the financial means for them to live their lifestyle and nothing else. They live their purpose outside of work.

But for me that isn't the case. I feel the need to be spending my work time in a productive way and I don't feel as though I can do that in my day job. Worse still, my salary is too low and I can barely afford to live. A recent financial burden has caused me to have to cut out all of my investments so as each month passes I get a month older and make my retirement poorer! So when I look at it that way I see my job as nothing but a treadmill. I am not working towards my purpose, I am not learning anything (though I did learn a lot in the first few months, but not any more), and I am not even making any financial progress.

So what am I doing? Surviving. Getting older. Losing my skills. Becoming increasingly frustrated. I've spent many years of my life in self employment so I am not particularly used to working for somebody else anyway so its certainly not uncommon for me to just want to quit my day job and want to start out on my own again. But now I feel as though I have real clarity over exactly what I want out of life.

The difficulty I face now is a familiar to one to many people I'm sure: financial commitments. I'm in my mid thirties, I have a house, a car and a child. If I just walked out of my job I would burn through my savings extremely quickly because I still have so many things I have to pay for and if I could not make a living before the money had run out then I would have to go back to job hunting and it would have all been for nothing.

Do I take the risk and just quit? Do I suck it up and go to work like everybody else and stop worrying about higher purposes? It's a tough decision, one that I can't make today. But of course by not deciding, I am deciding! But not deciding to quit, I am implicitly making the decision to carry on working on that treadmill, getting older and more frustrated. And that is the root of the problem. This is not something that will just go away. Every day that goes by that I spend the majority of my time at work is another wasted day in my eyes. There are small things that I can do to ease the pain such as making sure that I work on my web development projects daily but it just doesn't seem like enough.

So for now at least, it's back to the treadmill...