Am I Happy At Work? Analyzing my entire career
Ctrl-f + &quot;fire&quot; in comments... Nothing??<p>The author mentioned FIRE (Financially Independent, Retired Early) which, IMHO, a big factor in your happiness at work based on my own experience being on both ends of having money and nothing.<p>Some background context - worked for a decade+, quit job to go travel for 6 months with sizable savings in bank account, came back almost broke, now back in the workforce.<p>So I am one of the lucky ones in the world to absolutely love the industry I am in hence never hated &quot;work&quot;. Colleagues, office politics, etc is another matter but &quot;work&quot; itself was always interesting thus I was happy in the sense that I never hated doing my actual &quot;work&quot;. What I noticed that contributed to my happiness at &quot;work&quot; was how correlated it was to the savings in my bank account. The more my bank account grew, the less I worried about the &quot;other things&quot; (crazy bosses, stifling politics, strange colleagues, etc) and the more I could relish enjoying the challenges of doing my actual &quot;work&quot;.[1]<p>Fast forward a decade, I then quit my job to travel and it was absolute bliss of happiness! Kind of a taste of retirement life. HOWEVER, while I had a huge chunk of savings, it wasn&#x27;t exactly FU forever money so as the bank account started dwindling while traveling, I noticed  my happiness was correlated again and I started enjoying traveling less.<p>Once my bank account was down to an unacceptable level (for my own standards), I made the decision to go back to work to replenish it and work again towards my FIRE goal. I managed to get another job in an industry that I enjoyed doing the &quot;work&quot; but I wasn&#x27;t exactly feeling happy this time round due to the constant worry about being laid off, having to pander to colleagues and&#x2F;or bosses, dealing with politics, etc. Doing the work was fine but a lot of my unhappiness came from worrying about &quot;everything else&quot; at work due to me depending on the paycheck.<p>Fast forward to today, my savings are back to healthy levels and once again, I&#x27;m happy at &quot;work&quot; even though nothing has changed in terms of &quot;everything else&quot;. Makes me realise that anecdotally for me at least, <i>having FU money</i> in my bank account contributes A LOT to my happiness at work - assuming of course with a caveat that you love doing what you are doing at work.<p>[1] I put apostrophes (&quot;) around the word work because I defined work in this context as not the job&#x2F;position as a whole but the actual thing that I do. I.e. If work is Software Engineer at Google, I defined &quot;work&quot; as doing code related stuff.