Unhappy at work? How to find meaning and maintain your mental health | Big Think

SIMON SINEK: There's a statistic that over 90 percent of people go home at the end of the day feeling unfulfilled by their work. This is the difference between liking your job and loving your job. You can like your job, but do you love your job? And over 90 percent of the people who work these days don't, and I imagine a world in which that statistic is completely reversed.

DAN CABLE: The evidence is that about 70 percent of people are not engaged in what they do all day long, and about 18 percent of people are repulsed. They're actively disengaged from what they do. And I think that the reason why I say this is a problem, and it could even be called an epidemic, is because work is mostly what we do. We spend so much more time at work than with our families or those things called hobbies, and so I think that the pervasiveness of people feeling like work is a thing that we have to shut off from, a thing that we can't be our best selves, a thing that we have to get through on the way to the weekend. I think that that is a sort of humanistic sickness. And while it is bad for people, that's the humanistic bit, it also is really bad for organizations who get lackluster performance.

JOHANN HARI: I notice that lots of the people that I know who are depressed and anxious, their depression and anxiety focus around their work. So, I started looking at, well, how do people feel about their work? What's going on here? Gallup did the most detailed study that's ever been done on this. What they found is 13 percent of us like our work most of the time. Sixty-three percent of us are what they called sleepwalking through our work—we don't like it, we don't hate it, we tolerate it. Twenty-four percent of us hate our jobs. So you think about that, 87 percent of people in our culture don't like the thing they're doing most of the time. They send their first work email at 7:48 a.m. and clock off at 7:15 p.m. on average. Most of us don't want to be doing it. Could this have a relationship to our mental health?

CABLE: I didn't live back in the 1850s, but all the records suggest that you could buy shoes and those shoes would be sold by some store, some cobbler, and maybe there would be three people that worked there. Rarely would there be five people that worked there. While that probably wasn't the best work in the world, each of the people in the store would watch the customer walk in and then they would make a shoe for that customer, and then they would take leather and they would sew it and then they would give it. And around 1890 we got this different idea as a species where we should not sell two pairs of shoes each day but two million. And this ideal of scaling up had certain implications for how work felt, and part of that was because it was decided that the way to do this would have extreme efficiency by breaking the work into really small tasks where most of the people don't meet the customer. And this idea of removing the meaning from the work was intentional. And the idea of removing the curiosity from the job was intentional. For Henry Ford, curiosity was a bug; it was a problem, and he needed to stamp it out in the name of reliability and quality. Now, I'm not saying we're still acting just like the 1900s, but I am saying that that's when we cut our teeth on management practices. So, I think it's, in my own opinion, a lot less about which industry and a lot more about the culture and the expectations for what different employees can bring to the party.

SINEK: When we feel safe in our own environment, when we feel that our leaders care about us as human beings and want to see us grow and build our confidence and our skills, when we feel safe in our own companies, trust emerges; it's what happens.

CABLE: There appears to be a part of our brain called the ventral stratum, that's the technical term, or you also could call it the seeking system, and this system is urging us to explore the boundaries of what we know. It's urging us to be curious, and by the way I mean innately. And evolutionarily this system was developed to help us, to keep u...