Self care? Chores? Try and fix every problem with your life before you have to go back in less than 24 hours to the job you hate?
Easily the most effective for me has been to develop, review, and/or do one action item off a plan to be able to leave the job and work towards something I want to spend my time working on. Knowing I have a plan, remembering it and seeing that it’s a good plan, and taking steps on that is a concrete reminder that the job I hate is temporary and I’m not stuck. That reduces the scaries significantly for me.
Then I also like to clean my place, light a scented candle, and read/watch something to make where I live feel cozy, comforting, and home-y. A reminder that even though the job is shit, I have at least built a home that I come back to. Might call a friend and talk it out too - works on both levels.
What do you do?
Thr scaries start for me once it gets close to noon and the day no longer feels young. The feeling that the day is lost merges with a similar feeling about life, which urges me to do something, anything, with my time.
That’s when I usually get a burst of productivity that lasts until it’s 5pm. The weekend is gone and it’s time to enter self care mode. That usually means good food and entertainment in one form or another. As it gets dark I’ll start trying to stop time with booze or a bit of weed as I indulge myself with sports or a movie.
I will often go to bed early so I can be all cozy and in a safe space to go down a wikipedia hole, read a book, listen to music and just veg in general.
Once the day is actually over the scaries usually have disappeared oddly enough.
It’s a general feeling of dread of the weekend ending and having to go back to work on Monday. Some people let it ruin their Sundays.
Get yourself some long term goals so you aren’t just living for the weekend
just living for the weekend
You want a piece of my heart?
You better start from the start
You wanna be in the show?
Come on, baby, let’s go!
I should clarify. By “long term” I mean longer term than one week.
Get some goals that the job feeds into. This can be:
- Saving money to buy something (example: you want to travel to Italy, so you’re saving for plane tickets. Going to work means earning money for this)
- Gathering work experience to prepare yourself for something (example: you want to be a counselor, and dealing with shitty retail customers allows you to practice your patience for when your clients are frustrating)
- Directly achieving the goal with your job (example: you think lead is bad in water, and your job is replacing lead pipes for the city of Denver)
This is three different types of long term goal that can make your monday morning meaningful.
Monday sucks when all your reasons for getting up are negative. Examples of negative meaning are:
- You don’t want to get yelled at by your boss
- You don’t want to lose your job
- You don’t want to be evicted
- You don’t want to be lazy
If all the meaning that’s getting you out of bed on Monday morning is like the above, your life is basically a living hell. Being motivated by fear sucks really bad.
Finding goals that are positive lets you be motivated by desire, which feels much better. Positive goal examples:
- Travel to Italy
- Practice being cool when faced with people freaking out
- Reduce the amount of lead people are consuming
It takes a while to get the hang of it, but organizing one’s life as being motivated by desire makes life so much better you can’t even imagine it.
My trick is that I enjoy my job.
What if you like your family more than your job? Hustle and bustle of the work/school week (even an enjoyable one) makes it incredibly hard for me to spend time with my family outside of weekends.
You recognize that you can’t always get what you want, and focus on appreciating what you have, rather than what you cannot change.
And you evaluate the parts you don’t like, asking “is this somehow serving the parts I do like?”
The job is meaningful if it allows your family to have a house.
But if there’s another job that maybe sucks less but pays just as much, then maybe your current job isn’t so meaningful. It’s just meaningless pain.
By doing this evaluation you get benefit on both sides of that outcome:
- When something does serve the parts you like, it’s easier to bear
- When something doesn’t serve the parts you like, it’s good to know so you can work on swapping it out with something that does
I’d be an awful person if I didn’t like my family more than my job. Yeah, I’d love a better split of work and home time, but it is what it is. I’m home by 5.30pm or earlier every weekday, so there’s evenings and weekends for family time, but we couldn’t do things if I didn’t have a job that pays well.
I used to ask the same question as OP, then I discovered this trick (with crap load of luck, I had tried to find a job that I’d enjoy for a long time before I got one).
I remember thinking in my early twenties that I might as well kill myself if my experience was all adulthood had to offer. Thankfully it has quite a bit more to offer, it just takes a lot of time and effort to find it. I’ve never been suicidal, but at that point in my life I seriously couldn’t see putting myself through such misery for 40-50 years until I could retire, and was desperate for answers.
Similar experiences. I was thinking “that’s it? Now i have to do this 5 times a week, recover on the weekend, and then again for the rest of my life?!”.
People kept telling me you get used to it. I felt hopeless after couple of years because it didn’t get better.
Now I realize that a full time job doesn’t need to mean that you are a husk working your life away, always completely drained.
Work hard. Play hard. I try to do all my chores and tedium in the weekday. Weekends are two-day vacations.
Work from home on Monday
