Dear Prudence,
Most people don’t have enough hours in their day, but not me. I’m a young man in my mid-twenties employed by a Fortune 500 company, I work from home, and I work all of eight hours a week despite my best efforts. For some people, this is ideal, but it’s impacting almost every area of my life.
For background, I work in project analytics for a major manufacturer. My Mondays begin at 8:30 a.m., when I look at my calendar and, behold! I don’t have a single meeting until Tuesday. After offering assistance to my teammates and bosses, who never take me up on it, I usually spend the day playing video games and spending too much time on YouTube—all within arm’s reach of my work computer. Once a week, I’ll have a “busy” day with two hours of meetings and an hour of work to do on my own. To be clear, all my weekly work is done in eight hours or less, to the degree that there’s genuinely nothing else for me to do but be available. A lull in business rhythms is understandable, but this has been going on for the better part of a year. I’ve drawn as much attention to this issue as I feel is safe to: Asking for more responsibilities has yielded nothing, and reiterating that desire even less. After bringing this up to my boss five times in six months, I get the sense that I should stop, because drawing attention to my lack of work might embarrass the team, or might even reveal what I suspect is an organization-wide problem.
I’ve always been a hard-worker, and this is killing my work ethic and confidence. I don’t like how I behave and communicate and feel when I languish in this privileged bubble of WFH video game marathons: I feel short-tempered, insecure, stir-crazy, and like I have it way-too-good to be complaining. I think work is intrinsically valuable, in that it gives all of us an opportunity to have our strengths shine; without actual “work” to do, I feel my strengths waning and my resentment growing. As you can see, I’m taking it personally.
This might be easy to glean, but it’s not just work on my mind. I do exercise and it helps, but I’m stuck in a loop. The brain can look for patterns where there are none, and we sometimes draw connections to our own detriment: At work I feel both like a waste of space and a talent wasted; on a night out, I feel out-of-place and paranoid; on a day in, a recluse and a disappointment. These comparisons are not true, but they’re like the scaffolding of a mindset that’s gotten out of hand. The way I see it, I’m more the issue than my job is. I’ve gotten through mental health challenges before and always, always, getting myself to a calmer, more forgiving and grateful place has made the “problems” in my life shrink back down to their actual size; and using those tools to make friends and solve problems, seeing the benefits of good therapy, has brought me a lot of satisfaction and joy. I don’t expect I can fix my job, but I know I can improve my negative self-talk, fix my propensity to throw pity parties, and get my confidence back. How do I get over myself? Where do I start?
— Malaise Manufacturing, Inc.