Everyday is everything

Find meaning in the daily drudgery or consign yourself to a lifetime of dissatisfaction

Does your job consist of mostly pointless bullshit and admin without a profound sense of connection to the bigger picture?

There are jobs where it seems, from the outside, that confidence in one’s contribution could be easily found. The golden thread between What You Do and Why It Matters is shimmering in the light - clear, beautiful, visible to all.

Doctors. Charity workers. TV stars. Prime Ministers. Famous musicians.

Surely, if you were one of those people, you’d wake up each morning filled with a sense of fulfilment and connection to the bigger picture. You’d know, without having to dig very deep, that the work you were doing mattered. Counted. Meant something.

But what does the daily life of any of those jobs consist of?

For a doctor, the glamorous life-saving surgeries are but a minor part of the daily grind. Much of it probably resembles what you’re doing already. Paperwork. Emails. Meetings. People. Complaints. Planning. Preparation. Early mornings. Long shifts. Writing patient notes. Updating electronic health records. Writing referral letters to specialists. Filling out insurance. Processing prescriptions and lab orders. Corresponding about patient care. Supervision. Training. Research. PD. All of staff meetings. Health and safety. And so on.

For an NGO worker, they’ll be quick to tell you that the heartwarming stories and rewards are blips inside a funding treadmill - applying for funding, tracking funding requests, preparing accountability reports - as well as all of the tedious administration that comes with managing many stakeholders and other people’s money. Again: meetings, phone calls, reports, paperwork, Zoom calls, people with urgent demands, complaints, planning, preparation.

For the TV news anchor, the day starts very early, or runs very late. There are hours of preparation, reading, and notes. Sitting in a makeup chair. Standing around. Putting on a game face regardless of your personal feelings about what you’re reading.

For Prime Ministers, it’s pretty much all readings, meetings, and travel.

For famous musicians, less reading, but a lot of getting off and on planes. Waiting in studios. Sitting in meetings pandering to the money people. Lonely nights in hotel rooms away from their family.

And so on.

You might think to yourself, on an average day, filled with bullshit meetings, lacklustre lunches, dramatic deadlines that count for nothing, and general tedium: “This is shit. My days are shit. Not like other people’s days. People who really make a difference to the world.” You might be wrong. Or you might be right, and the truth might be that those are everyone’s days.

Parenting is probably the best example of this. 1,000 infinitesimal sacrifices that add up to a child raised and a life lived. Every ass wiped, bowl of cereal poured (and left uneaten), tantrum endured, bed made, pair of shoes purchased, and drop-off successfully made is your contribution to the growth and development of a person and the successful building of a family and a legacy. Each one is so small as to be nothing, but without them, there is nothing. The small moments are all there is.

If you want to find significance in your life, a connection to the big picture, and a sense of your broader contribution, it might not be a different job that you need, or a different person you need to be, but rather, a different perspective you need to have. The sense of fulfilment you enjoy may have much more to do with how you perceive your life and how it all fits together than what your days consist of.

There are very few magic moments where it all makes sense and feels good. Weddings, graduations, Mothers Day cards, and other such things. There are many, many more moments of utter tedium.

What if those moments of tedium are not the distraction, but rather, the point? What if the joy, the contribution, the fulfilment, and the reward aren’t waiting around the corner once we’ve done enough, or achieved something big, but rather, are there in the everyday? Every minor annoyance, email, invoice, phone call and cup of tea?

Nora Ephron, brilliant screenwriter, famously said: “If you can’t be happy washing dishes, you can’t be happy.”

(Other excellent Ephron-isms include “Never marry a man you wouldn’t want to be divorced from” and “If pregnancy were a book, they would cut the last two chapters.”

Photo by Catt Liu on Unsplash

The dishes, or whatever your equivalent is, are the access point to the bigger story of your life. The reality of even the most illustrious and impactful contributions to humanity is largely pointless drudgery. You don’t need to be George or Amal to see that. Most of their days are Zoom meetings too.

What you’re doing matters. Remind yourself of that today. Enjoy the dishes.

AM