My DAY Job Almost Killed Me

With each passing year, 2005 becomes more of a distant memory.

That was the year I left a day job that almost killed me. Being in that job will be remembered as the cause of long-lasting physical pain and the development of an auto-immune disease.

Pain And Suffering In Exchange For A Paycheck

How did my day job almost kill me?

I was in a job that I could not stand. I dreaded going to it.

The hour-long commute was draining. Tied to a desk and a headset answering investment-related calls left me drained as well.

So I did what so many others in my department did, I applied for a new position within the company.

And for the first year in that new position, I really enjoyed what I was doing.

It was playing to my strengths.

Then that department was merged with three others. Everybody in the four departments, 40+ people, was to be trained to do everyone else’s job.

I enjoyed what I was doing and what I learned to do for two other of the merged groups.

The fourth group was the one that I got physically sick thinking about trying to learn it. Part of the issue was the person that was training me. He annoyed me to high heaven. He was the type who management that was the “golden child” and that even his poop didn’t stink.

Fast forward a few months and I am placed on a “disciplinary performance evaluation” for not wanting to learn the process for the fourth department that had been merged. Unfortunately, I knew that it was my time to leave.

I looked for a job outside the company. I found one. But in that year and a half, almost two years of high stress, I developed psoriasis, which then became psoriatic arthritis. And I’ve been dealing with that, ever since the pressures that we put ourselves under for a job just doesn’t make sense.

Lessons Learned

I had stayed with that company for nearly 7.5 years.

Since college, I worked at a bank and an investment company. I felt that I was pigeon-holed into the financial industry.

The last department I worked for was marketing financial products so I thought I could “do marketing.”

When I left that investment company, I did so to become the marketing manager for the local paper. I soon learned that print was dying (since I wasn’t adapting).

I learned to code and helped the newspaper create websites for some of their smaller publications.

Eventually, I started creating and maintaining websites on the side. The year was 2007. I had created a side hustle.

I learned not to trust a chronological resume and to start thinking in terms of a functional or skills-based resume.

One focuses on your past- your job titles. The second focuses on the skills you developed.

I also learned that if we were to die at most of our jobs, the company would have that position posted online before our obituary was written.

So why are we spending so much time, energy and passion working at companies are in jobs that do not provide us an outlet or an expression for our passion?

Find Your Passion And Calling

We need to look for the Passion in our lives.

We need to actually live from the movie.

Mel Gibson plays William Wallace in Braveheart and has one of the great lines in movies, “every man dies, but not every man lives.”

And I’m pretty convinced that applies to us as well.

Thoreau said, “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

I think that’s true, we’re desperate to live lives with meaning desperate.”