People's happiness at work usually dips mid career

It's very mental - I should be the happiest kid on the block, but this is when you start to look back at time wasted, and wonder if your incredibly lofty goals will ever come to fruition.

Everyone thinks they're meant for greatness - so few reach it, and right around now is when we start admitting to ourselves that we may not be all that extraordinary.

Hopefully, I'll be able to get past all of these mental roadblocks before my 50s!

What they don't explain is that there are fundamental shifts happening with regards to work, age, education, income, etc.

Those changing statistics are everywhere. People are having children later, people are having more jobs throughout their lifetime. Tenured jobs are being eliminated.

So for me, the now is so very different from what it was that I was moving towards. Most all my jobs have been contract based / project based / entrepreneurial and start up based. My peers who have excelled have done so in the civil service and in the creative industries, but not in more traditional areas such as finance, business, law and medicine. Why? Because there is a boat load of dead wood up ahead of them. What used to be tiny steps professionally for people in their twenties are coming to people later and later in life.

Work is changing. Work expectations are changing.

But here's the thing, it's always been changing. It changed during the Wars, when millions of people died. It changed in the post-war period. And it's been changing ever since.

Work is bad in your 30s for the reasons that this article outlines, but for many it's worse now than it has been for several generations. But it's clearly better than it was 100 years ago.

All I ask is that culturally we have those expectations in line with what it actually happening. For many people, highly trained, highly skilled, and highly educated, it's a tougher row than it has been for a while. Sure there are winners, but the bread and butter, working and middle class jobs have been crushed.

And I believe it's going to get harder and harder. For this I hope that our kids don't have to read this articles about how things are for people in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. Because for one thing, it's going to be so very different.

I know people who say to their kids that they've got it easy. I'm telling the kids that I know that they've got it hard. We are over the high point in terms of employment and per capita income. And if we don't make some radical adjustments to our economic distribution policies, it's going to get worse.

Besides, isn't 40 the new 30. (Or was that 50?)

ps. I'm currently looking for better work opportunities myself and I'm in my 40s.

It's entirely unclear to me whether the results have any applicability to the types of technology jobs that the largely (I speculate) Silicon Valley HN audience holds.

For one, software engineering isn't exactly hard physical labor, where getting a promotion to foreman in your 40s may mean a lot less hauling concrete. Second, women are present in greater numbers in white-collar jobs than in construction. Third, relationships with your coworkers are likely going to be different in an office environment. Fourth, there may be cultural differences between Australian construction workers and the rest of the world, even U.S. construction workers. Fifth, there's likely not the same (alleged, at least) age discrimination in construction, where you gain more skills over time and aren't expected to know the latest inane web JSRubyPythonGolangMartiniNodeDjangoErlangLuaRailsExpressConnectHaskellRestMVCController framework du jour.

So in other words the NYMag.com article this HN thread links to could have been written exactly the opposite way -- by concluding that the study's results have no proven applicability except to, well, Australian male construction workers.

[1] http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2014/07/peoples-happ... [2] http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=search.displayRecord&id=...

There's nothing like walking out the door to "Daddy, I miss you!".

The you feel bad for laying the long day on your spouse so you can "crush it".

In your early 20s, you're like a girl in college. It's very easy to get "activity" (for college girls, sex; for young nerds, jobs with minor but impressive perks) but it's really hard to find respect. (I stopped being indignant about gender disparities in dating when I realized that, in terms of getting respect, it was equally hard for men and women.)

Your late 20s is when you learn that most employers-- and especially the "prestigious" ones-- never much respected you. You may have been right that you had the right idea or were the smartest one in the room (whilst ignored). It didn't matter. You didn't have a chance. That enlightenment can be a bit painful.

This "mid-career blues" period seems to be the stretch in which a person has learned a few things about what people really are when there's enough at stake, but before having enough life experience (or, for the apolitical or fortunate who are able to focus on the work more than the politics, domain mastery) to avoid the obvious pitfalls, deal with obnoxious personalities, and still play the game to a win. The 27-40 period seems to be when people learn their hardest lessons-- first firing or layoff, first non-paying client, first lawsuit, first truly unethical employer. (My friend started consulting and is dealing with his first non-paying client.)

The problem, in the US, is that we're practically not allowed to talk about what is really going on. The fact that I've been open with some rather vanilla details of my Google experience has made me into some sort of +3-sigma outlier "bad-mouther". We live in this culture where we're supposed to pretend that these negative experiences just don't happen. Everyone pretends to be "crushing it" and getting $150,000 signing bonuses and all that bullshit. The result is that the painful experiences of that mid-career spell become isolating, because people are shamed into silence. And that's a fucking crime.