Thought: Hating work after 35

This week, Bloomberg covered the results of a survey from a HR firm. It turns out:

• 1/6 of 35+ hate their job
• 1/3 of 55+ don't feel appreciated

Basically, as we get older work seems to lose its shine. For comparison, only 8% of millennials report hating their work.   There are probably lots of reasons for this e.g. being passed over for political reasons, not achieving dreams, routine, work-life balance etc.

I'm not sure this is a new phenomenon.

As a youngster, I experienced something of the same at school. For me, and many others, school lost its shine around the age of seven. After that it became kiddie prison. I still did reasonably well academically, but I'd realised school was a racket. And if it wasn't quite pointless, it was no longer fun and exciting.

Much of my learning from then on, took place outside of school. For example, I would near devour odd old musty-smelling volumes of encyclopaedias obtained for almost nothing from charity shops and jumble sales.  If I wanted to, I could disappear down rabbit holes of learning for as long as I liked. I had, for example, a six-month obsession with learning everything there was to know about rats!

Then, when I was around fourteen, I discovered something interesting:

School could be hacked.  

In one of my  art lessons, we were given an assignment I didn't particularly want to do. Over one weekend, I put together my own assignment and did all of the preparatory work for it. I probably thought, if I have to do this art stuff I might as well have fun with it in my own time. I showed my "home" work to my art teacher and to my surprise, she suggested I work on that instead of the set assignment.

Art lessons were never the same after that. If I didn't like the look of the assignment, I'd bring my own alternative one instead. That flicker of empowerment was enough to maintain my interest in the rest of school.

Later, I figured work would probably turn out to be like school and I'd get fed up with it.  I was lucky to be assisted in this realisation by older adults either explicitly or implicitly. Some of them had always hated work, others had grown to do so.

That encouraged me to do three things:

• Promise myself I'd never do a job I hated.
• Build an FU fund to enable it
• Wherever possible, I'd hack work in the same way as I had school.

I was reminded of this recently because of a recent article by Ramit Sethi where he basically does his usual schtick of ragging on something to inspire a reaction - even if his actual belief is a bit more nuanced. It's a neat trick. In this case, it was the FIRE community for their frugalness and extreme saving.

His, I guess, largely millennial audience were "hell, yeah"ing in the comments section. And that made me wonder if some of that reflects their relative newness to work.

I'm not in the business of doling out advice, but if are any of Ramit's millennials reading...Maybe it's worth considering that you might change your mind about work as you get older and that perhaps the FIRE community has something of a point.

Personally, financial independence is the ultimate FU fund as it gives you complete empowerment over your work.  I now prioritise working on things that:

• Make a big difference to the organisation I work at.
• Play to my strengths.
• Enable me to learn and grow.

As long as I can keep doing that, I can't imagine giving up work for a while.

PS. None of the above should be construed as financial or career advice. As ever, do your own research, seek out a professional etc.