You’re reading Life-Work Balance, a series aiming to redirect our total devotion to work into prioritising our personal lives.
What’s your dream job? Many of us have an idealised notion of what the perfect workplace would be like. Flexible working, a four-day work week, an outrageous salary?
While there are certainly perks that mitigate the conditions of work, we can also ask whether it’s our dream...to work?
Given the choice, most of us would love to have more time to pursue the things that bring us actual joy and not worry about our professional endeavours, our performance, pay, and the day-to-day gripes of employment.
Really, our work should be a complementary part of our lives – something that has purpose, allows us to use problem-solving skills, make connections – but that doesn’t bulldoze over everything else.
Instead, much of our lives are dominated by work – it’s often the first thing we ask about when we meet someone new.
But what if we stopped talking about ‘dream jobs’ and instead, overhauled our attitudes to aspire to something bigger than labour?
It can be hard to reset your thinking on this, so if you’re someone who’s constantly hustling for their next career move, it can be useful for hear from those who’ve managed to land their ‘dream roles’, because it doesn’t always turn out dreamy.
Londoner Jane*, 27, who works in film, can relate to this. After acquiring a job with her dream company, she was shocked to realise it was a dud.
“I started working for a creative and cultural landmark for the film industry which was a dream. They are known across the film industry and fund people’s dreams of being a filmmaker through their grants. But for me it was a horrible experience with the way a creative, cultural institute is so obsessed with hierarchy and playing rank at every chance.”
Jane cites bureaucracy and rigid HR structures that made life difficult.
“They have a lot of red tape and the simplest of tasks becomes a huge chore,” she says.
Unfortunately, Jane, who still works for the company, has given up on trying to change things. “I have experienced gaslighting and painful HR processes that I have given up on challenging following a year of pandemic hardships,” she says.
For others, what was once considered a dream job failed to materialise, but they’ve established a happy medium between work ambition and outside work fulfilment.
Despite working in a career which she aspired to since her youth, associate editor Sam says she’s realised there are more important things in life instead of constantly chasing thankless roles.
“I always knew I wanted to be a magazine journalist,” she tells HuffPost. “And I worked hard in various unpaid internships. I was always proactive in doing all the right things to get there, so when I landed a role at a big magazine I was thrilled.”
But the job, which changed to a branded content role based on precarious shifts, wasn’t fulfilling for Sam who also dealt with a difficult boss.
“With a bully for a manager, I needed to make a change, so I put in for a part-time contract to allow me to freelance on the side,” she says. “While I’d love to be full-time freelance, it’s not practical with a mortgage and the state of my mental health, so the fact that the role pays my mortgage while I get to write the things I really care about on the side is a happy medium.”
The perfect job, if the cliche is to be believed, is one that “doesn’t feel like work” at all. But let’s get real: no one actually dreams of labour. If tomorrow money was no longer a factor, how many of us would stay in the traditional workforce?
Sure, work is a thing that has to be done if we want to live in a smooth-running society. But perhaps we ought to remove associations of work as the ideal and dream bigger.
*Names have been changed.
Life-Work Balance questions the status quo of work culture, its mental and physical impacts, and radically reimagines how we can change it to work for us.