My Working Life

So I'll start with my job. Employment. Work.

First off, I have to say that I am very, very grateful to be working. Even better, I am in a field I feel passionate about and ideally, my job can have a real impact on improving people's lives. However, I frequently find myself frustrated by ... well .... by reality. It's a government job and a tendency towards bureaucracy can slow things down to a crawl. I feel like I have to exert enormous amounts of energy to move my projects even slightly forward. Or, in a similar manner, I will dash ahead make all sorts of progress only to find that the nature of the project has completely shifted beneath me. As you can imagine, I find it hard to be productive. I don't like being less productive than I know I can be. I get frustrated. I get depressed. And I want to do my work even less. I feel like I will be wasting my time, energy and talents. I find it especially sad because the work itself is fascinating.

I realize that in this day and age, more people have access to more jobs than ever before. People do have the ability to choose so many things. So far I have chosen three different jobs and have yet to love any of them. Each one I have been passionate about, from geology, to GIS, to planning. I started off incredibly passionate about each field, but the passion quickly cooled. Don't get me wrong: I have loved and appreciated the things I learned, but ultimately I feel unsatisfied.

Is this a pattern? If I move into a new field, will I love it at first, and then feel unfulfilled? It makes me afraid to seriously consider doing something different. As seen from my last post, I have many different passions. But if I take the leap to a new field, will I just wind up unhappy again?

"Chose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life." - Confucius

I don't know Confucius. I hear you, but I just don't know.