Is your job fulfilling?

Just want to drop the concept of Ikigai here:

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.
- Could you recommend something to read?

No, I don't feel like my job is full filling. Would I switch though? No. Why?

The people I work with are awesome
The companies culture is overall great
I feel valued and supported

So why is the job not full filling? Because I dislike and borderline hate the industry we are in: Marketing/Ads. Probably only next to fossil fuels the reason why the world we live in today sucks.

Could I go elsewhere with my skillset? Certainly. But having had terrible employers with whos' products I could somewhat identify with before, I came to the conclusion that it's not necessarily most important what you do but with who.

I really appreciate this take. Sounds like you've found a good situation. I'm sure there's not really a perfect job so you'll always have to compromise on something.

I work to live.

My career is fulfilling. My current employer is trying to make sure this specific job is not.

That's extremely poetic. I might use it
Why would they do that? Personal vendetta?

Thankfully, yes. I grew to hate my previous job because of shitty leadership. I was cut when there were two rounds of downsizing because I was the best-paid on my team. They did me a favor. I was only half-heartedly looking for a new job because doing so is challenging when your morale is blasted from working a shit job.

The new job is far higher stakes, but also far easier 95% of the time. I'm reading books during my downtime between putting out fires. I'm uniquely qualified for the role. I can also walk to work in ten minutes. And I absolutely love my boss. It'll be six months tomorrow. Wooooha!

They killed my job and gave me a huge win.

Edit: OP, how about you?

Sort of? I'm on Peace Corps service for now and in some ways it's really awesome, but at the end of the day the actual work is with the government and it feels like actually doing anything out here is like trying to run with a ball and chain.
- I appreciate you for trying to make a difference.

My work is important and is sometimes in the news. And if I really screw up, it will definitely be in the news!

It has its moments. The opportunity to figure out a tough problem or create an innovative solution can be very rewarding.

What busy work there is I can work at my own pace, so long as I meet deadlines.

I work from home, have a fair amount of autonomy and responsibility and have no one looking over my shoulder.

I recognize I’m very fortunate.

Yes! Self-employed, four-day work weeks, 4-6 hours a day. Enough money to be comfortable and to put some away for later. I have to clean the place by myself on that weekday off, but that's fine. Cathartic even.

May I ask what you do?
- I'm an ESL instructor in South Korea. My situation did not happen overnight. I'd worked in quite a few different private and public schools before this opportunity presented itself.

I've worked on an ambulance for 37+ years. Still enjoy work. I'd be happy to reach 50 years. We'll see...

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 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.

Yes! I work for a non-profit, providing a highly in-demand service to my community, for free or at a reduced cost. Nobody is getting rich doing what we do, but we are actively enriching and supporting our community. It is also a fantastic foot in the door for other forms of cooperation, community support, and mutual aid.

Not all non-profits are on the level, but no company with a profit motive will ever provide the kind of environment that a good non-profit can.

Nope.

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'm a freelance chef.

Fairly well paid (I can work parttime and still pay the bills).
I'm ridiculously self-disciplined and stress-resistant so I find it quite easy.
I get to see behind the curtain at a lot of restaurants.
I've built something of a local reputation and a circle of friends in the industry.
Being good at cooking, organising, and leading people is in itself very satisfying.
People find me more attractive because of it, haha.

I'm just sick of making money for other people and sort of sick of working evenings. Oh, and people are always asking me to cook for them. Otherwise, I'm fulfilled. It'll be time for me to look at setting up my own place soon enough.

It fills my bank account, if that's what you're asking!

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.

It would be fulfilling if it paid enough to do more than just scrape by. It's basically social work

It is if you focus on the ultimate end state, which is a very serious net human good.

But jesus, the path to making that happen can grind you down. Canyon-like process gaps in some areas, poor integration of the different business lines, every area has been short-staffed since the pandemic with no end in sight, taking on more work without an appropriate allocation of resources, etc.

Have said "Fuck this, I quit" to myself more than once, only to come back because my memory of times where I was involved in something positively life changing for some random human in my country.

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.

Not in the slightest, but it's easy, and I work from home, so that's pretty nice

Yeah. Left print media and IT for driving people to the hospital.

Crossing now into better pay than IT. Actual pension. Still get to problem solve. Help. Do craziness. Do naps.

Little bit of both here. When there's something important going on, I bring it. Other times, we're just waiting for something important to happen.

Journalist?

It has the potential to be meaningful in the right time and in the right place but generally it's just a transaction of skills to survive, and have some means to have a fulfilling life outside of work.

No, but I am fulfilled by the things my wage pays for

Ish? I run machines at a steel tube/chromed bar processing plant in the Midwest which is kinda neat but also mind-numbing, but the money is really good for what I do. They just offered me an outside sales position over my whole state so... I like doing new things and my background is in food and bev so I'd much rather be dealing with people than pushing buttons on a CNC or hone all day plus for a pay increase and not being all gross and oily when I get off work? No-brainer

Stay at home dad

Fuck yes

My boss does not give me busy work and my work is important, but I still phone it in.

Very cool! Is the red blood cell development aimed at creating blood transfusion products?

I'm a stay at home parent and also do comedy part time. Both are fulfilling, but exhausting.

We're building a data lake which is pretty boring. I try to keep myself inspired that maybe just maybe the optimizations gained from these data analytics will lead to a drop in our greenhouse gas emissions from this organization.

Data... lake?
- Centralized data storage that is more flexible than a data warehouse. Just a big ole database