I haven't been able to work for a few years due to disability, but my last job was surprisingly fulfilling. It was very challenging. Without that, I get bored.
My job is not fulfilling…anymore. I started in the industry and consumed knowledge. Landed a high level job in the industry but due to regulatory bodies (which is understandable) I’m not able to use most of my knowledge and am wilting in capabilities now.
Moving up is nigh impossible within the company. However, I do get paid enough that I’m not cheque to cheque and can focus a bit more on my outside life. That with the additional fact that my specific job is extremely stable to economic factors comparatively, I’ll probably stay.
At the moment I am intensely bored at work. The job is not challenging and most of my stress comes from dealing with broken software, useless vendors or a few business units that vacillate on requirements. But:
Most of my internal customers are very nice
My team is eccentric but tolerable.
I am compensated well.
But I’m still looking for a new position because I feel my brain is melting by staying here.
I get paid well doing something I enjoy while also helping millions of people. The hardest part is really the stress. It can cause big issues if I misplaced a single character on a line of code that can have real consequences and it’s with small amounts of oversight.
I'm between jobs for the first time in my adult life at the moment. My last gig lasted nearly 10 years and it was a wild ride. I found it fulfilling for a time, but I eventually got promoted to a position I wasn't wholly satisfied with.
I started off at the very bottom rung, doing tech support for customers on the phone/chat/email. I was great at it and got promoted quickly to higher ranks of support, and eventually wound up managing the floor of tech support agents. Those were some of the best days of my life. Halcyon days.
Every day was like a really low-stakes episode of House, where in the course of helping agents solve technical issues for customers, eventually we'd encounter one really inexplicable, difficult, borderline impossible problem that nobody had ever seen before, so me and my team's brightest would walk and talk while hypothesizing and figuring out our next move.
After a year or two of managing the floor, I got promoted to a position where I was ultimately a code monkey. Then Covid happened, and my job became fully remote for 4 years straight. Which was great! It allowed me to do my work and also spend way, way more time with my infant son during his early formative years. I got incredibly lucky in spite of the pandemic. But over time, the burnout grew to the point where I knew I needed to find something else to do with my career.
I'm lucky enough to have enough in savings that I can take a bit of time to reflect and think about what I might want to do going forward with my admittedly limited credentials.
I would encourage anyone who is interested in this concept to do a little more reading on the concept. Ikigai is a lot more than just fulfillment with employment- which is closer to the concept known as hatarakigai. I appreciate you sharing this meme though- it was how I was first introduced to the concept.
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