Do I hate my job, or do I just hate work?

The only thing I'm absolutely certain of is that it won't be in a corporate environment, and it will be much more of a get-your-hands-dirty, active kind of job.

Plus, I don't mind a little physical labor.

What about you, Nimh? What's your take on this? What do you do for work?

Oh, hey, thanks for the completely bald question - I don't think I can. And how are you today?

I cant help wondering whether I'm cut out for any of this at all. My boss, in the end-of-year-evaluation, explained what I could do to use my capabilities to "move up", and while smiling politely at him inside I was screaming "what if I don't WANT to move UP!!??".

I hate the office lingo, the project talk bull, the whole ... castles-in-the-air thing. The intangibility of it all. I feel like I'm wasting my life, and loathe myself for the cheerful bla-bla I spout at meetings, even when I know its not actually all bla-bla at all, it's just inside I feel like it is, which says more about my state of mind than the work I guess. Well OK, perhaps it says something about both. My allergy to the office language/culture thing is irrationally fierce tho. When the other day some people sat next to me in the train and started having one of those work discussions about co-ordination this, outreach that, I physically felt sick and I had to get up and move down to another seat. And if my problem is with that thing, per se, just moving jobs within the field might just make things worse. (And I just had an offer for a job interview, abroad, so thats a serious question - do I want to give up my home, plants, my few friends, to go so far for something that might just put me in the exact same problem - but more acutely so, having to prove myself and all? (I mean, the job is also actually more concrete and all - but then again the organisation is more corporate..))

Yet what is the alternative? I'm seriously jealous when I read about your dad driving mail from the main post office to the little villages/towns around. That would be so totally OK for me now. Or when I hear of my friend's friend who has her own biological farm (though I couldnt stand getting up that early). I yearn for something concrete, practical, no-nonsense, and void of all those pretensions and vacuity of yet another project proposal to bring together partnerships of transnational actors to promote intercultural competences and facilitate the exchange of good practice on the empowerment of ... whatever. Yet at the same time I'm afraid that, in reality, if I really were to become, say, a furniture mover like you've been (that caught my attention for a moment, before I remembered I have the physical strength of an endangered bird), I might become numbingly bored for the lack of a challenge. Or at least would over time, later on in life, and then not have the chance anymore to go back to the opportunities I guess I formally have now in this line of work.

In short, I'm stuck. But I dream of being a stained glass setter or mosaic maker or bookbinder ...

... then realise all those jobs are on the verge of extinction.

How old are you again, Kicky? I'm 33 ...

Flow is an optimal experience characterized by:

a sense of playfulness

a feeling of being in control

concentration and highly focused attention

mental enjoyment of the activity for its own sake

a distorted sense of time

a match between the challenge at hand and one's skills

The flow experience is when a person is completely involved in what he or she is doing, when the concentration is very high, when the person knows moment by moment what the next steps should be, like if you are playing tennis, you know where you want the ball to go, if you are playing a musical instrument you know what notes you want to play, every millisecond, almost. And you get feedback to what you're doing. That is, if you're playing music, you can hear whether what you are trying to do is coming out right or in tennis you see where the ball goes and so on. So there's concentration, clear goals, feedback, there is the feeling that what you can do is more or less in balance with what needs to be done, that is, challenges and skills are pretty much in balance. When these characteristics are present a person wants to do whatever made him or her feel like this, it becomes almost addictive and you're trying to repeat that feeling and that seems to explain why people are willing to do things for no good reason -- there is no money, no recognition -- just because this experience is so rewarding and that's the flow experience.