Is the idea of the ‘dream job’ dead?

I Do you want a job that is just … a job. “Every time I talk to friends and peers about their careers, when the inevitable question about” How does? ” Crop in the conversation, a chorus that emerges over and over.

Many of them, once idealistic about what their careers could offer them, would now struggle to answer if asked about their ‘dream work’. “Why are we expected to put all our hopes and dreams on our work?” Ask Rachel*, 26, who works in marketing. She says she stopped thinking about her career in terms of an end goal to achieve, or a ladder to climb, and is more concerned about how her next step would affect her life in general.

Likewise, Jake*(34) tells me that after more than a decade in communication, he is now looking for a roll that will allow him more free time and a little more breathing space, even if it looks like a step from the outside. “The ambition is just no longer there for me,” he says. “I want a decent salary, decent hours, and to feel like I have my life back.”

It is not the only one that remains. Last year, the Chartered Institute of Staff and Development questioned over 5,000 workers for their good work index report, and found that 47 percent said a job was just about money, nothing else, of 38 percent in 2019. 51 percent said they would be willing to work harder than they should; Once again, the percentage has dropped since 2019, from 57 percent. The workplace consultation firm Gallup also found that job satisfaction dropped to a record low. The company branded this phenomenon “The Great Detachment”, which reflects how workers feel increasingly disconnected, even indifferent, towards their work.

So is the dream work dead, or at least on the point of extinction? In order to get our heads around the question, we must first investigate how we came to work in the first place, or at least work on a pedestal. Tim Duggan, career expert and author of Work backwardsTell me that we tend to see work in one of three ways: a job, a career and a calling. “A job is when you work mainly for financial gain, a career is when work gives you satisfaction of learning and promotion, and a calling often becomes the ultimate level to pursue,” he says. “It is positioned as a rare condition where you are so intoxicated by the value of what you create that it never feels like hard work.”

The idea of ​​the ‘Dream Job’ is a relatively new one, says Natasha Stanley, head coach at Careershifters, a company that supports people looking for a career change. She determines the concept as emerging in the aftermath of World War II, in response to a decline in organized religion and the rise of a more individualistic society. “The places we once were to find that our purpose of purpose disappeared, we turned to our work,” she says. “We expected our careers to offer not only a mechanism to put food on the table, but also to provide a supportive community, a pleasant pastime, moments of joy and a deep sense of existential meaning.”

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So, in other words, we started looking at our work to give us all the fulfillment that our lives do outside of work Maybe we have offered before. No wonder, it may feel like it’s an almost moral zeal to be of your work: It’s as if we’re supposed to believe that really, really in B2B sales, makes you a better person (you just need to look at some bizarre, pseudo-spiritual rhetoric that looks at Linkedin).

The emphasis on our ideal career begins early. From childhood, we are asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” by well -meaning adults. My own list of ambitions went from paleontologist to “The narrator in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat‘To spy before more prosaic lands on the journalist. However, this seemingly innocent question begins a process by which we are identified by what we do from nine to five – and defined by our potential work.

As we progress through the school, there are choices like our GCSEs and the qualifications for which we choose after we turn 16, tend to be aimed at our career expectations “If you dream of being in a certain niche”, Jenny Holliday careers show. “It can be a positive expectation – after all, we have to be prepared,” she says. And youthful pursuit is certainly not a bad thing. “But at the same time, it can mean that we are focused on one specific ‘dream work’ role, which then cuts out other possibilities from our minds. ‘

Of course, a belief in the ideal of the ‘Dream Job’ is very convenient for the people at the top of the corporate food chain: those who benefit from our willingness to put in the extra hours, late at night and in general to answer a little hr, go the extra mile. In reality, the whole concept can be used to hide a multitude of sins. There are whole industries that are the fact that young, idealistic employees are willing to work for low payment because they believe they are pursuing their creative passion. Think of fashion, film, publication, journalism and many more (it is often sectors where it is taken for granted that workers can somehow strengthen their rare wages with financial support from their families).

These employees are told, whether explicitly or implicitly, that they are simply ‘happy to be there’ so that they have to work harder, never complain about any abuse – that famous scene of The devil carries PradaIn which the icy editor Miranda Priestly tells her a derogatory assistant that “a million girls would kill for this job”, there is emerging. “The idea of ​​a dream job can sometimes be fraudulent and set a ‘keep going’ attitude in workers,” Holliday says. “We were all there, myself included – not to be promoted if we felt that we should either not talk or” push back “to a manager because we feel that we are” happy “to play in the role we are in.”

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Often, the reality of chasing your purpose is just not in line with the way you suggested your working life to pave out, as author Katy Segrove found out. She spent years “completely committed to my dream of writing play films”, along with an ‘intense’ day job in TV production. Eventually, she chose a script, landed an agent and traveled to Cannes and Los Angeles. Sounds envy-inducing, isn’t it? But over time, she found that she fell out of love, instead of feeling ‘burnt out and cut’ and simply ‘exhausted with the whole process’. The balance between work and life does not exist. “Writing in every free minute didn’t allow me to build a life outside of work,” she says. “I needed space to find a romantic partner and have a fuller life, so I had to make changes to make it happen.”

She later decided to start writing short episodes of children’s animation, and also set up Pick Up your pen, a coaching business that supports other writers; To help them “feel much more meaningful than chasing myself”, she says. She adds these days, she is “much more mindful of how I use my time, and which supports my spiritual and physical health. I am also very interested in what makes us happy – which is often not what we expect.”

For many, the pandemic has shaken long beliefs about what we really want from our careers and out of the rest of our lives. When Lockdown made a necessity for office workers from home, some people had “more time to dedicate to different parts of their lives,” Stanley says: ‘Such a family time, hobbies and social contribution all feel freshly important. Instead of [being] The crowning glory of our lives has regained its place as one piece of the pie. “

Since then, however, it has begun to feel as if a wave has opened between workers and their employers. Workers have seen the benefits of adopting a hybrid approach, which blends in the office for some time, but many companies are now maintaining the rules of the back-to-the-office, which made the previous promises about flexibility. It is hardly surprising that there is a grudge bubble and manifests in the general disillusionment.

Widespread layoffs and stationary wages only contribute to this feeling. After all, why would you want to define yourself through your work when your so -called dream work can disappear or change above the recognition by next month? Our grandparents and our parents may have seen hard work going well, but the picture is very gloomy now. “The unspoken trade -in was if you worked hard enough when you are young, you could enjoy more freedom and capital if you are older,” Duggan says. “Now, many people are questioning whether it is worth it, and it affects how many ambition workers have.”

Instead, employees prioritize the balance between work and life above glorified bustle. A study by HR software company Ciphr found that more than two-thirds of the workers consider it the most important aspect of their work, which beats pay, job security and job satisfaction. “People don’t want to be defined by what they do, but who they are,” Holliday says.

As a result, Stanley says she noted that “more and more people [are] Looking for the ‘good enough’ career ‘rather than the dream job. They want to ‘work on their own conditions’, to ‘do something that feels meaningful’ or ‘help them to feel in peace’ – or maybe something that pays the bills, so they can strive for their hobbies, or to travel. Maybe they started to see that work doesn’t always have to be a calling or a vocation.

*Name has been changed