Dear forum members,

I just discovered this website rather by accident. Apparently, it is one of the first results Google shows when you type “I hate every job I do”… which gives a pretty accurate albeit condensed summary of the situation in which I currently find myself (and many other people as well, so it seems… :-)), so why not take the opportunity to discuss and share certain thoughts with you.

Just as a preliminary remark: I do not know whether this website has been intended for an American readership (or not), since I live and work in Belgium. But I think that many of the challenges I currently face are quite similar to people from the USA, or can even be shared universally. And perhaps it could be refreshing to have some thoughts and insights from people living thousands of miles away across the Atlantic… 🙂

So let me start by giving a brief autobiography. I am currently 29 years old, male and single still living with my parents due to financial considerations – even though these are not the real challenges I face.

I had the opportunity to attend university back in 2006, not knowing exactly what kind of job or career I would like to pursue later on, so on my parents’ advice, I enrolled at the faculty of law. During that year, I met a couple of people who would later on become my best friends (some of them still are) and who managed to stirr my interest in philosophy and under whose influence I enrolled at the faculty of philosophy one year later (I did not terminate my law studies). Then there came a very cheerful, fulfilling and purposeful period which lasted until 2012, when I succesfully terminated my MA in Philosophy. Of course, the question then arose what I was supposed to do afterwards since an academic degree in philosophy is definitly not of the highest market value – to say the least. My biggest dream was to pursue an academic career at the faculty of philosophy, so I enrolled as a PhD student at my alma mater. This was in 2014, but there was quite a challenge to face: I wasn’t granted any funding, so I had to earn my modest living myself, as I didn’t want to imply my parents all the time for financial support.

Back then, I already had a first (completely unrelated) parttime job as an administrative assistant in the office of a law enforcement firm (a very hard, ruthless and rude world indeed!) which I did not detest altogether, but which I had to leave since the monthly paycheck was much too low. So at the same time I was drafting the very first pages of my PhD dissertation, I also applied for a new (parttime) job, to find myself ending up as a claims officer for an insurance agency. The job itself, which I quit in September last year, was (relatively speaking) certainly the most pleasant of all the jobs I have done so far, since I had a real face to face contact with the many customers and claim experts in my office. My boss even gave me the suggestion to become an independent insurance agent, since I did my work so well, and many clients liked the way I coped with their affairs. I, by contrast, was rather reluctant since I my heart and passion still belonged to my PhD project…

… which did not quite proceed as I exptected or would have liked it to proceed. For a start, my job at the insurance agency was very demanding: even though I officially worked until 5:30 pm, I had many days that won’t end sooner than 8pm (a bit my own fault, since I was too perfectionistic to treat the files that I was entrusted with in a purely administrative/procedural way). Moreover, I was legally obliged to follow certain courses and pass exams in order to have the legal permission to keep doing the job I was doing. Due to this, there was not so much progress going on in my PhD project, which irritated my PhD supervisor who was constantly asking for administrative progress reports. I, on my turn, was a bit annoyed by the fact that he couldn’t fully understand the circumstances under which I had to operate). I also had the feeling that I and my PhD project were just approved, not out of interest in the themes I wanted to treat, but rather to fill the faculty’s statistics with regard to the number of enrolled students (by means of which its subsidies and allocations are calculated). As I result, the relationship between my supervisor and me did not last long, and I formally ended by PhD project in the first half of 2016.

After doing this, I made the most terrible mistake ever. Instead of focusing on other opportunities to fulfil my academic and philosophical interests, I instead turned my focus fully toward my ongoing career in the insurance industry which I wanted to further develop. Perhaps not really out of interest, but out of frustration: it was the insurance company that in a certain way jeopardized my academic pursuits, now it would be payback time for them! Hahaha! However, instead of becoming an insurance agent (which is just a puppet-on-a-string of an insurance company), I wanted to become an independent insurance broker. I even followed a couple of additional courses and a training in business management, and I also applied for jobs with insurance brokers and insurance companies in order to gain more in-depth professional experience. Without success, however, perhaps even luckily so.

Such a vainglory and such a waste of precious time, I could say now! What went on in my mind just one year ago remains a mystery to me. However, at a certain moment last year when I was looking for something in my wardrobe, I stumbled upon a carton box containing all the papers and books related to my PhD project, and I perused in some of the materials that immediately caught by interest back again. It was then that I realized that I was just wasting my time by joining the headless cohorts of career hunters, opportunists and hollow businessmen in black suits. So the only thing I could do then (out of psychological necessity) was to quit the whole insurance world, which I succesfully did in October last year. Since then, up to now, I work as a customer service agent for a Belgian supermarket chain. Even though this job is actually a ‘degradation’ in rank as compared with my previous job in the insurance agency (and boring as hell!), having fewer responsibilities and duties, my monthly income rose once again.

A happy ending, then, after all? No, for I wouldn’t have submitted anything on this forum. Since my new workplace is located about 70 kilometers (45 miles) from home in an industrial area poorly accessible by public transportation, I now see my myself (luckily “just” for 4 days a week) driving to a place I, in fact, truly hate – frequently getting stuck in traffic jams around Brussels – and where I just go to collect my paycheck. What keeps me going to that place is the relatively good pay, and the fact that it is also a parttime job.

However, doing a parttime job means that one does it in order to have more free time to pursue an (or more) activities that give more instrinsic satisfaction. I was thinking to either restart my PhD project on a more freelance basis (that is, without all the administrative redtape that goes with it) or to enroll for a new study at university – just out of curiosity (both theology and classical languages are still on top of my bucket list!) But I still cannot decide what to do, and when. As for now, the commute to and from work is really exhausting, meaning that the third day of my weekend is usually used to recover from the fatigue. Also, the workplace itself is a large open office with little or no air circulation, noisy environments and dull (mostly female) colleagues that keep on chatting on the newest type of nail polish they just tried on. In short, a real ‘hellhole’ for silent and introverted persons as me, also draining a lot of energy out of me.

Which means that even if I succeed in doing an extra study or an informal PhD on top of my job (a job that I will, sadly, need to cover the costs), I still need to schedule a plan for the ‘longer’ future – that is, for around 2025. But what should I do, and how? These are the questions that haunt me day and night, 24/7.

For a start, I am about to become an ‘unbeliever’ with regard to the modern mantra of ‘work-life balance’, which is actually a myth. It implies that there are two distinct realms that inhabit a person, and that somehow need to be balanced. But what one really wants is simply life, without the work. So, we aspire to work less and ‘live more’, but this usually does not happen as we want to do things (travel, follow courses, buy a new tv set,…) that are certainly costly endeavors and for which money is required, and for which we usually have to work… harder to get them! Moreover, employers are well aware of the fact that the costs of living are dramatically rising as well, hence that they can actually do with their employees (whose revenue probably comes solely from one employer) whatever they want. In my case, for instance, I could save a lot of time and energy by working remotely from home (which could be perfectly possible if I just had a laptop with the necessary equipments!) but the company I work for still adopts an old-fashioned policy involving time clocks, ‘staff watchdogs’ and other utterly pointless control mechanisms. So, there I am back in the traffic jam, exhaling gazoline fumes in the air and asking myself for whose purpose I am doing all this… And yes, I could also move closer to work, which I am intending to do, but even then things won’t be as perfect as they should or could be. Then there is also the final remark that employers, regardless whether you work parttime or fultime and even regardless whether it is the public or private sector, expect you ‘to give the best’ or ‘to run that extra mile’ (if you know what I mean…) and to keep up with the newest technologies, working methods, etc. Things I really don’t care about at all (I just do my current job as good as it needs to be, that’s it!), so whenever there will be a reorganization within the firm, I am afraid I’ll be the first who may pack his belongings. And there I’ll stand then, single, without work and without any courage let alone desire to put myself on the crushing wheel of the economic system again…

So in the long run, I definitely will need to do something that I can do fultime and that I can call not simply my work, but my life. And here’s where I simply get stuck. Whereas I am still applying for paid academic positions, I am still wondering whether this is the best strategy to pursue: the academic world, even in the humanities, has become increasingly competitive and becoming obsessed with purely quantitative evaluation criteria such as grades, distinctions and number of peer-reviewed publications. Moreover, research assistants and paid PhD students are required to get involved in a lot of administrative tasks that do not deliver anything substantial to the project they are working on (even though I was fully aware of the ‘administrative burder’ in the time when I was an unpaid PhD student). But the worst thing is that even if one manages to survive the academic rat race, chances are pretty low to proceed your career once your PhD is finished. And then we finally enter the gruesome caverns of the labour market after all…

So is there any place, then, where I can pursue my lifelong project of discerning and discussing truth, knowledge and goodness without having to undergo the hellfires of the earthly Jeruzalem? The last couple of months I am still more and more considering entering a monastery, even though I do not have any official religious affiliation (not with Buddhism, nor with Christianity which are the two main progenitors of the monastic life) and, most importantly, even though I do not know whether this is a vocation that would really suit me (however, I’ll go on a one week retreat this summer in a Trappist abbey in Southern Belgium – yes, with a brewery internationally acclaimed for its beer, indeed! 🙂 –  so I may figure it out then)

These are my thoughts as they are right now, but I am not sure whether they are correct and/or whether I am missing something and/or whether I am not relying on too many prejucides. What are your thoughts on this, dear forum members? As the great philosopher Socrates’ command went: ‘know thyself!’ But without your help, I wont be able to discern anything substantial about myself altogether, I am afraid…

Best regards,

Plotinus (not my real name, of course, but the name of a very enigmatic ancient philosopher whose work I really appreciated! :-))