Go ahead and cry!
Torments wherever you look. Everyone is talking about one thing - the crisis. Whoever is affected, pours out frustration: the physician, the book author and the management consultant. Not because they lost their job. But because they lack something. The fulfillment, the fun. A few months ago you would have understood. For hours talking to the red wine considered what to change. Maybe a new job. A business idea. Or emigrate. But now that the wind is blowing harder in business, everything is different. The possibilities. And the understanding of people who complain about their jobs.
50 000 jobs destroyed worldwide in a single day, 500 billion euros of new debt. These are the facts, outside, in the business world. But there is still the other crisis, an inner, in the very private work universe: The German Trade Union Confederation last year examined how satisfied the Germans are with their work. The result: Of 40 million working people, 87 percent do not like their own job. "The unemployed are the frustrated ones!" Write Volker Kitz and Manuel Tusch in their "Frustjobkillerbuch".
The frustration meets especially those who seem to be fine. Excellently trained, high-paid genetic researchers and computer specialists, engineers and lament in the evening in the bar: "I had imagined but five years ago, otherwise routine, where I stay, my creative possibilities, the fun?" The professionally self-realized I belong since the 90s to the virtually unofficially evidenced employee rights. Well-guarded college children left school to study at the universities of the world. Growing up in prosperity, with parents who wanted and were able to give their children everything, they found life above all as a sporting competition with the possibilities: It should be perfect. Satisfied love. And of course the perfect job. Exactly what to do, what to fit - what you had talent, what you wanted and what you years later at the class reunion best still impress could impress - that was and is one of the job selection criteria par excellence. Making career compromises? No way!
So all the options were explored, which somehow offered on the way to working life: scholarships, stays abroad, internships, another study. And whoever got only a "job" and not a "job" after that had definitely done something wrong. Being able to realize one's job is a precious and important privilege of the Generation Golf. However, it is not crisis-proof.
Indulge in a party of mid-thirties at a party that you see your job primarily as a bread job that feeds your family and you, and that you just do not find the constant search for the professional G-spot quite up to date. May there be crisis out there, most of us prefer to circle around ourselves like the scrap all over the earth. I'm happy? Does my work fulfill me? But what is a fulfilled job? Is not that also someone who emotionally nourishes and fills you up in good times, so you have a cushion to go through worse times? The phases of the routine that gives one time for others, has private things? Phases in which we sometimes have to do things that we do not like to do, then start again with passion into a new project? We should just shake hands a little more with reality.
Just work. Maybe that would be a solution, at least for a while. Adulthood also means biting your teeth and getting through bad phases. Sometimes I do not like what I do. Then I consider my work trivial, silly or at worst superfluous. Then I get annoyed that I did not go to the medical examination 14 years ago and now I do not work as a doctor in the Congo. Then I see the hole in the shoe of my son, the pending transfer for the maintenance of the gas boiler and think: "This is your life now and here, you wanted it that way." So go on, help nothing. " That may sound Prussian, but curling on the bald head has never worked.
And quite apart from the economic crisis: who says that it would be better in another job, in another company in the long run? The authors Volker Kitz and Manuel Tusch even claim that the profession you are practicing is "the best you could get and that it does not matter who we work for." At some point, everything becomes routine.
The real problem is the false expectation: We want everything from our job, it should make us happy, fulfill, demand, fill the account.But it does not work - just as one person can fulfill all the needs we have. Even in relationships, there are times of hardship, times when it does not work out that way. Do we therefore immediately change our partner and doubt our meaning of life? No.
The café, which we may want to open again someday, can stay in the back of your mind. You do not have to write off the sabbatical once and for all and forget the question of a meaningful work forever. But a fulfilling job is also one that you can do for a while under conditions that are not so good. So: get to work.
Recommended reading: Volker Kitz, Manuel Tusch, "The Frustration Jobkiller Book", 254 p., 19.90 euros, Campus-Verlag
Do we want too much of the job?
fulfillment: Almost all men and women interviewed think that a job is not a wish concert - you also have to put up with things that you do not like so much.
Security: More than two-thirds of respondents say that routine work is important to them because it gives them security.
Money: For men to earn money, it is a good third, the women approach the job idealistically: Here say 22 percent, the job is only there for the material there.
Love: More than half of the women (53 percent) say: My job is as important as my relationship. For men it is only 43 percent. Every third woman would find a job loss worse than the end of a relationship.
Family: After all, 17 percent of the men surveyed think that women should seek fulfillment in the family rather than in the job. However, just 9 percent of women share this view.
Unique: 91 percent of respondents say: Financial independence is very important to me - men and women do not differ in this respect.
Source: Forsa, April 2009
