Why I struggle in a Job I hate

Everyone knows that life has been turned upside down over the last several years. If you ask me when an event happened within the last 2-3 years, I have to really sit back and think about it. I feel like the years between 2019-present are just an overwhelming bled of never knowing what is about to happen. During the entire time of the pandemic, I was under a lot of stress from work. I am what was considered an "Essential" worker. No, I don't work in healthcare. I am someone who works in a warehouse, those big buildings where all the goods you may want to buy from a business comes from. While people were panicing due to a crazy sickness that no one knew anything about, I was still working. There would be days when we had less than a dozen people to help complete all the tasks that would normally be done by twenty plus people.

Still, even after everything, with inflation, rising healthcare costs, and insane fuel prices, I barely make enough. I struggle to figure out why I stay at this job when it makes me unhappy and doesn't feel like it pays nearly enough. Like many, I went to college and earned a four-year degree. Unlike many, I continued paying my student loans throughout the pandemic pause. I paid my dues, I worked through the pandemic because I was considered "Essential". Afterwards, as the world continues to spin, the only people that were truly considered essential were health care workers.

Why do I stay at this job? The answer is actually simple. I don't have another job lined up yet. I find it highly irresponsible to quit a job and not have something else lined up. People claim that you can do this and that and earn so much money from home. For some that works, for others, not so much. A lot can depend on where you live and the demographic of people around you. I struggle with a job I dislike because in the end, it's a job, it pays me enough so I can live, and because I won't just leave because I want to. The current state of affairs in this country and events from the pandemic have left me at a crossroads in life and I feel as though many people, like me, are simply tired from it all. I struggle until I can find something better until something clicks and I can figure it out.

It has been something of an experience, a trip through my own mind to try to figure out what I want, where I want to go, and how I want to guide my growth through life. Over the past years though, this has begun to feel like a hollow and pointless thought. Ambitions I once had have withered and turned to dust within the mental factory of my mind. Part of this is due to what I do. I feel like I am working in another dead-end place.

Many people try to fall back and rely on hobbies, which I have found to be somewhat helpful, but, at the end of the day, I think I truly desire what most desire. A job that values me to the point that they want to pay me a wage that allows me to live without stressing about how to pay my bills. Money doesn't buy happiness but, sometimes I would rather cry in a nice house than wipe the sweat and dirt from my brow in an apartment that costs almost as much as a mortgage and comes with next to no space.

I will continue to struggle, I will fight to make life better, as I hope anyone who reads this fights for themself. Life only ends when you truly give up and let yourself fade to the background of your own story. We just have to keep writing, chapter by chapter, word by word, until we can create the story that we want to read.