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In some surveys regarding work place satisfaction up to 87% of people are disengaged with their work.

In his extraordinary book Lost Connections Johann Hari suggests that lack of engagement at work and a lack of meaningful work is one of the major causes of depression in Western Society.

In 2012 Gallup surveyed hundreds of thousands of workers across every continent and suggested on average up to 25% would ‘actively sabotage their work place’.

If you stop and think about this for just a second these are extraordinary statistics. It suggests that the vast majority of people in the work place are silently dying and only surviving working weeks to provide themselves with ‘stuff’ which doesn’t make them happy, meaning that they have to return to work the following week so that they can buy more ‘stuff’.

In my opinion, your satisfaction at work can be measured quite easily by the ‘fear’.

Some people call it ‘Sunday night feeling’ and someone cleverer than me should develop a scale or a matrix which measures ‘Sunday night feeling’ and puts a number on it and then measures it against the level of depression in society.

I know of people who get ‘Sunday night feeling’ on a Saturday morning, in those situations something has to change.

In consideration of these things, I always return to Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

I can understand persisting in a job that you hate, fear or dread because you can’t get passed the first two rungs on Maslow's hierarchy (physiological or safety).

If you have to go to work to buy a gun to keep your family safe,or to pay for food, heat or shelter I get that; any work will do. But once you pass above this and you’re safe and you’ve got something to eat, why would you go somewhere that you hate, unless stopping you going there forces you back down the ladder.

We know, and we have known for years, that above a very low level of income happiness doesn’t increase, not at least until you get to extraordinary levels of income which none of us are likely to get to.

We know that the constant pursuit of shiny bright objects including houses, cars, holidays, handbags, technology and others doesn’t mean that other people are happy, it just means that they persist in chasing these objects even more.

I understand that when you come back from holiday after having a wonderful time with family or friends that there is some regret going back to work, but you can’t live your life like that all the time. In that situation, we just need to get on. To feel the fear every week, god there must be more to life than that?

“The days are long, but the years are short”.

Blog post number: 1564