Does the dream job really exist? Or should we learn to love what we do, whatever that may be?

There is a quote attributed to Freud which runs: “Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness”. Love can certainly be considered somewhat ambiguous, but work is usually something we choose with the aim of maximum fulfilment. Is it not possible, though, that these days - objectively speaking - there are some jobs that are better than others?

Forbes recently published a ranking of the ten happiest and unhappiest jobs of 2016: recruiters are the happiest of us all while at the other end of the spectrum lie the poor sales account managers. If we were to ask a graduate to talk to us about their professional hopes and dreams, it is unlikely that they would reveal an overwhelming desire to become a recruiter, or abhor the idea of one day taking on the mantle of sales account manager. The happiness we wish for is different from true happiness, and there is no guarantee that a job which makes us happy will actually be our dream job, just as there is no guarantee that our dream job will, in fact, make us happy.

No less fleeting than love, then, is the goal to be happy at work; Gallup ran a study on happiness in the workplace back in 2014, which even alluded to a worldwide employee engagement crisis (engagement here is taken to mean a combination of participation and enthusiasm as well as a level of connection to both work and colleagues).

Source: Gallup.

Unhappiness in one’s job has a quantitative cost, but the qualitative side-effects are worse

Based solely upon this data, it would seem that work, rather than being a source of happiness, is, on the contrary, a source of apathy and boredom. Another factor in measuring general unhappiness in the workplace is the fact that more and more professional figures are emerging every day to tackle this issue (think career and executive coaches): these are individuals devoted to placing people in jobs that make them happy, and they often focus in particular on work that matches the jobseeker's personal values. It is inevitable to look at such dissatisfaction from a quantitative point of view, and how it impacts productivity; however, it is more important to evaluate it qualitatively: when society begins to consider work to be synonymous with unhappiness and disinterest, work begins to disgust us - it begins to look an awful lot like a frantic anthill where everybody just carries out tasks without any of the depth or humanity that their emotions would have provided. And this, it goes without saying, is rather dangerous.

If, however, we take a look at another study, this time conducted in 2015 by the London School of Business and Finance, the data we get is somewhat more vague. Looking at a different group in the UK, those sampled were not asked if they were happy with their job but whether they would change it, or whether they felt any regret for having chosen their particular career to begin with. In the graphic below, those who answered yes to the first question are shown in red, while those who answered no are shown in purple: 47 per cent of participants wanted to change jobs, and the number rose to 56 per cent once the over-54s were excluded. After all, it is the young who are usually more open to change.

Source: London School of Business and Finance.

What the results clearly show, however, is that when faced with the more direct, almost existential question as to whether they regretted their careers, participants suddenly showed a lot less dissatisfaction.

Source: London School of Business and Finance.

Somewhere between pursuing the perfect job and resigning ourselves to the boredom of an unhappy one there is a third option

Let’s look a little more closely at this data. Only a minority of people seem to be content with their jobs, and the desire for change we see corresponds to this trend. And yet, only a minority of participants actually regret their career choice. It’s almost as if they were praising fate, or something one might define as a kind of popular stoicism: “Though not necessarily the best of jobs and one I would indeed change, I do not blame myself for what’s happened, nor do I condemn the choices I have made.”

What if our reasoning for happiness were like this too? What if we accepted that, though we may not live in the best possible world and a better standard of living is always imaginable, it was by comparing these daydreams with our concrete reality and accepting the latter, giving it a value, that we could create a basis from which to become happier?

What we are left with is a middle ground between a simple, fatalistic acceptance of our working life and desperate dreams of a happier one. A middle ground which, as the ancient Greeks so wisely knew, often coincides with virtue.