Why Work Makes People Miserable and How to Fix It
Paid ranked only ahead of being sick in a study that measured happiness
The key to happiness is more sex and less work!
That’s the inescapable takeaway from a 2017 research paper titled “Are You Happy While You Work?” that wanted to measure how 40 different activities impacted our happiness.
Let’s dive into the report's details, which offer up changes you can make to live a happier life—at home and work.
Most people are not happy at work
The study aims to understand how people's happiness levels change throughout the day and how much being at work affects these happiness levels.
The researchers used data from "Mappiness," a smartphone app with over a million data points on happiness levels from tens of thousands of UK individuals.
Here’s what they found.
Paid work was ranked 39/40 activities, ranking only higher than being home sick in bed.
Working reduces happiness by about 8% compared to when people are not working.
How unhappy someone feels at work depends on where they work, who they're with, the time, and what else they're doing.
Working early in the morning, late at night, or on weekends makes people unhappier than working regular hours.
People are happier working from home.
People are happier when they work directly with other people in the office. What is more miserable than driving to the office to sit on Zoom meetings alone all day?
The exception to this rule of enjoying working with people at the office is when people work directly with their boss—This reduces happiness more than working alone.
A Data-driven approach to living happier
In a past article, I reviewed research that argued living a happy life means maximizing time spent doing things you enjoy and minimizing time spent doing things you don’t.
Simply put, happiness is found in enjoying your day-to-day routines and choices—Not some grand event or life-changing achievement.
A traditionally “successful” person will be miserable if they spend their days doing tasks they hate, and what society would deem to be an “average” will be happy if they are consistently engaging in activities that bring them joy, purpose, and energy.
As the researchers put it, “happiness is in the frequency, not the intensity.”
The problem for many people is that they struggle to know what will make them happy. We are so constantly bombarded by problems and working to pay the bills that many people have precious little time to reflect on whether they have created a life in which they could ever be happy.
While every person is different, here’s what the data from this study says on activities that are likely to make someone happy—or not.
If happiness is in the frequency of doing things we enjoy vs. don’t enjoy, then based on these results, the key to a happy life seems to be more sex, concerts, exercising, trips to the library, and time with friends, and less being sick and working and waiting in lines.
Notice that the things that make us happy are largely in our control—you decide whether or not you visit the library. While the things that make us unhappy are often not in our control—we all need to work, we all get sick, and we can’t control whether we end up having to become a caretaker for an adult family member.
Focus on what you can control and make the active choice to engage in activities you enjoy as much as you possibly can—this is especially true for people who are forced to spend a lot of their time doing activities they don’t enjoy. Some of us are dealt a worse hand than others, but we still need to play that hand to the best of our ability.
Another way to increase happiness is to reduce the misery caused by those activities we dislike.
Work is unavoidable, but the research offers some ideas to make work more enjoyable.