We’ve all been there: You’re sitting at your Day Job minding your own business when your boss or some coworker comes up and asks you to attend a boring meeting, fill out a pointless report, finish some useless project, or take on a new task that you know will absolutely 100% never benefit anyone or anything. It’s times like this when you sit back, throw your clenched fists in the air, and voice that familiar lament we’ve all felt a million times:
Why do I have to do this????
Being handed pointless tasks at work reminds me of being in middle school when a teacher needed to fill a lesson period and would give us some hastily photocopied worksheet that didn’t even try to teach us anything or hone any skills. Instead, the whole point of the worksheet was to fill the time until the bell rang, when we’d be shuffled out to do the same thing in another class. (In that sense being in middle school was excellent training for working pointless Day Jobs, and it can even be argued that our entire education system was developed to mold loyal employees better suited to work in factories.)
This, however, doesn’t make it any easier when you, a grown-ass adult capable of overcoming great intellectual hurdles, have to waste your time and energy on paperwork that any seventh-grader could do.
Why Do We Have to Do Pointless Shit at Our Day Jobs?
The answer to this existential-sounding question is actually pretty simple: Because that’s what they’re paying us for.
Think about it: if you’re working a Day Job solely to earn money, anything you do at that job is going to get you that money, whether it’s fun and stimulating or pointless and mind-numbing. As long as you don’t have a gig where you’re working unpaid overtime, your Day Job is an even trade-off of doing work and getting paid for it. It’s the You Don’t Pay Me to Care philosophy, plain and simple.
We get into trouble when we forget this and start wishing the work we did could be more stimulating, fulfilling, beneficial, or just plain fun. If this were the case, though, we’d have a Meaningful Job, which, as I’ve talked about before, is different from a Day Job in that it fulfills some greater purpose that you actually want to accomplish instead of just bringing you bill-paying cash.
In a perfect world we wouldn’t have to have Day Jobs or do pointless, idiotic work at any point in our lives so we could focus on the creative work we really want to do, and a lot of us including me are working toward the day we can make that transition happen.
Wait Just a Minute! When You Work On Your Own or Have a Meaningful Job, There’s Still Menial Work Involved!
That there is—in my writing life, I still have to type up my revisions one draft at a time, I still have to pack orders from my webstore and bring them to the post office myself, and the nitty-gritty housekeeping-type stuff on this blog doesn’t take care of itself.
None of these tasks are particularly stimulating, but they’re different from pointless Day Job tasks in that I took them on myself instead of some boss, corporation, or middle-school teacher thrusting them on me arbitrarily and controlling how I spend my time and energy.
The key idea here is control: if I set out to accomplish a task or goal, I can take charge of it and move toward that goal on my own terms because it’s something I genuinely want to accomplish. The same’s true at a Meaningful Job when you care about the work you’re doing and want to see it through, and the menial tasks that contribute to that goal don’t feel pointless because you can see what they’re contributing to and feel that sense of motivation at moving forward.
To go back to one of my favorite metaphors about dishwashing: washing dishes in your own kitchen is hardly the most stimulating job in the world, but because you know that washing them will give you clean dishes to eat off of, getting it done gives you a feeling of purpose.
If you’re stuck washing somebody else’s dishes just to earn a living, though, it can suck hard.
When Do Pointless Tasks Cross the Line?
I’ve always believed that the perfect Day Job would involve minimum amounts of time, effort, and frustration while providing enough money to keep you going while you focus on your actual goals. That being said, too many pointless tasks can push you over the frustration line and can provide very real grounds for you needing to find new employment.
I’ll also argue that general frustrations with your Day Job can change the way you view your work—after I had problems with my crooked boss at my old Day Job I stopped seeing the point of tasks I used to gain genuine satisfaction from, since I knew any work I did there was just putting more money in my boss’s pocket and allowing him to exploit more people.
The bottom line is that while viewing pointless tasks as just another aspect of your billpaying quest can help you maintain perspective, too much Day Job bullshit can push anyone over the edge and create a bad situation you need to escape from. And as always, only you can say how much is too much—no one else can draw that line for you.
Also, rest assured that if I didn’t find this blog meaningful, you wouldn’t be reading this right now ;-)
Here’s something that’s definitely not pointless—keeping in touch!
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