Personally, I've noticed people vacillate between hating their jobs and liking their jobs just fine, despite no real change in day-to-day management, policy, recognition, etc.
What I've seen as the big parts of the puzzle are stagnant wages, longer hours and whether people perceive themselves as trapped. (higher overall unemployment ~= less chance of switching ~= less happy)
> Personally, I've noticed people vacillate between hating their jobs and liking their jobs just fine, despite no real change in day-to-day management, policy, recognition, etc.
I find the scale you chose to be interesting. At the low end of the scale, you chose the word "hate," which is a fairly strong negative. At the high end of the scale, you chose the phrase "like ... just fine," which is somewhere between neutral and luke-warm. It's a shame that people never "love" their job. Considering how much of our lives we spend at work, liking my job "just fine" isn't good enough for me.
I've noticed the same vacillating. In my experience, there is usually a catalyst that makes someone hate their job---usually a decision by someone higher up that the person strongly disagrees with. Over a period of time (one to two weeks), the person gets over it and grudgingly accepts the new norm (returning to liking their job just fine). In a way there is no real day-to-day change, because the source of the catalyst events is the same, but the event itself can be a change.
To be fair, part of that is just American society. It's acceptable to complain about crap work and low pay. Whereas celebrating your awesome job and high pay is seen as uncouth. [1]
So whenever you tally up public statements about jobs, you should expect it to be tilted toward the negative.
In this case, I was trying to restrict it to people I've known whose attitudes changed while doing essentially the same job at the same place. But you know how anecdotes go...
[1] The same goes for many aspects of American life. When things go well you're expected to keep quiet in deference to those who haven't had such good fortune.
Hence "Fuck my life" and "white people problems" are memes. But there are no comparable analogues.
Amusingly, the only time Americans generally acknowledge that there's lots of complaining and little celebrating, is in the context of complaining about the complaining. (e.g. "Everything is Great and No-one is Happy")
> To be fair, part of that is just American society. It's acceptable to complain about crap work and low pay. Whereas celebrating your awesome job and high pay is seen as uncouth. So whenever you tally up public statements about jobs, you should
expect it to be tilted toward the negative.
I wonder if that could be a source of the problem. Would Americans be happier if the societal norm allowed for celebrating your awesome job? I think we would be. It's been shown that smiling makes people happier [1]. I don't think it's far-fetched that that theory could extend to expressing happiness with your job affecting your opinion of it. Since our emotions can also affect those around us, if it's only acceptable to complain about your job, that probably drags down those who actually enjoy theirs.
Another way this societal norm could be a source of a happiness problem is that even if bosses understand that they should care about their employees happiness at work, it's difficult to measure and focus on if people aren't supposed to express their happiness.
What I've seen as the big parts of the puzzle are stagnant wages, longer hours and whether people perceive themselves as trapped. (higher overall unemployment ~= less chance of switching ~= less happy)