Based on a survey InHerSight conducted last week, 75 percent of women say it’s important or very important for their job to provide a sense of fulfillment. I understand this desire completely. When you spend one-third of your life at work, you want what you’re doing to matter—and you want to feel happy, too. Happiness is a more important metric than we often allow.
I used to be able to pinpoint the time when I was the happiest I’d ever been. In graduate school, I lived in a big old house with six roommates—four women, three men. Most of us were young journalists in our 20s and 30s, and we were all excited about the impact we were making on our community. At work, we spent long hours chasing down interviews and tweaking headlines. At home, we cooked dinner together in our overstocked kitchen, threw massive parties for the people in our programs, and talked nonstop about ideas and nonsense. I laughed, and loved, a lot while I lived in that house.
When I graduated, I moved to Atlanta on my own to start a job, and my notions of happiness quickly became past tense—something that bewildered me at the time, but in retrospect, seems very obvious. I was writing for a magazine, which is exactly what I wanted to do in the world, but I didn’t feel fulfilled by landing the dream job or renting the cute single girl apartment because some key ingredient was missing, and I wasn’t happy. Happiness was making fried rice in a kitchen 600 miles away. This wasn’t that.
What finally brought happiness into the foreground for me again—years later, mind you—was changing how I thought about fulfillment, opting to view it as a type of currency that paid for, let’s say, my emotional mortgage instead of as a feeling that came as a direct result of having a career in a field I loved. In this new view, my job helped me pay off maybe 60 percent of that monthly fee. The other 40 percent needed to come from different avenues. Happiness revenue streams, if you will.
I found those funds by reflecting on what made that grad school house so meaningful to me, and pursuing opportunities that recreated those core emotions. Sure, friendship was a huge component of that experience, but beyond camaraderie, fulfillment for me rested on things like this: the feeling of being taken seriously and being in spaces and relationships that value accountability, curiosity, self-improvement, creativity, affection, and fun. I sometimes distill this to the phrase, “Even when we disagree, I am on your side” because I like working toward a common goal just as much as I value people who both like me and challenge me.
Today, I volunteer at a theatre, am learning to sew alongside some talented seamstresses, and have a community of people I love who embody that feeling I had years ago, which takes the pressure off my job to deliver 100 percent of my fulfillment needs all the time. (Although gender equity work does pack a punch.)
More importantly, I no longer think of that grad school house as “the happiest I’ve ever been.” Happiness and fulfillment nowadays are more like a wealth I’m building, and when I feel lacking, I tap into another stream.
