The case for finding joy in the ‘boring’ job

“There’s no shame in working in corporate to allow space for creativity outside of work.”

Look at any social media platform and you’ll see it – people want to sell you a dream. Their goal is always the same: To convince you that the only fate worse than working a nine-to-five is death. Whether they’re offering you a discount on their dropshipping course, or teaching you to manifest a soft artist’s life, they all claim to know the way out of the matrix, and it looks suspiciously like a one-time credit card payment on their website. 

Tons of articles, too, explain how to make the switch into coveted creative work, the elusive jobs that appear both spiritually fulfilling and financially lucrative enough to afford you several holidays a year. But in this economy, many of us face another problem. When times are tough, how do you bear pivoting from a career path aimed toward creative freedom into mundane, corporate work?

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The professional world is looking grim. Unemployment rates are predicted to rise, and AI anxiety is causing young Australians to feel increasingly pessimistic about their careers. The cost-of-living crisis has raged on as the arts sector has grappled with multi-million-dollar funding cuts, redundancies and shuttered doors. Boring work is boring, but it’s also often stable in an otherwise chaotic climate. 

Many influencers ignore these realities for the sake of the aforementioned hustle or their reputation. In my experience, few people in a creative industry ever willingly admit that a ‘normal’ job pays most of their bills. Someone can work as a caterer, a receptionist or a cashier, but if the job doesn’t align with their personal brand, it’s treated as taboo, a necessary evil that should remain unmentioned online.

But a growing few, like Sydney-based content creator Grace McClelland, are breaking the stigma around ‘boring’ work. When you look at Grace, it’s not hard to imagine her floating through life with ease. With an enviable wardrobe, dewy skin and mastery of the perfect outfit photo, she seems like the type who’s always had it all figured out, including her career.

But that’s not entirely true. In an Instagram post that’s amassed nearly 200,000 likes and 2000 comments, Grace details her journey from fashion design graduate to retail manager to receptionist, and how her big dreams of opening her own clothing brand one day began to fall by the wayside.

“I realised I’d probably left it too long to be able to get a job in fashion. I felt like I was stuck and had wasted all of my study,” she tells me. “To be honest, I didn’t really handle it well and had quite low self-esteem.”

 

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A post shared by Grace (@grace.m.mcc)

But the story doesn’t end there. Now she realises taking on a boring job was a necessary leap, a happy twist of fate that propelled her into a life she loves. “I noticed my quality of life dramatically improving; I felt a lot more positive and enjoyed my life outside of work,” she says. “That’s when I started to unlearn some of that shame I was feeling because I looked around and realised my life was actually in a really good place.”

So, what changed? In her viral post, Grace reveals she’d put her fashion dreams on the back burner long before she became a receptionist. Fear of rejection had left feeling too frozen to ever pursue them. Her ‘boring job malaise’ came not from the absence of her dreams, but from a job title she felt ashamed of. And she’s not the only one.

“Since sharing my story, I’ve had a lot of creatives reach out to me and say they were putting a lot of pressure on themselves just so they can say they work for themselves or in a creative career,” she says. “They’ve realised there’s no shame in working in corporate to allow space for creativity outside of work.”

 

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A post shared by Grace (@grace.m.mcc)

When I asked what advice she’d give to those struggling to choose between survival and satisfaction, Grace reminded me that everything is impermanent. No career choice, no matter how boring or exciting, lasts forever.  As circumstances change, we have the power to walk down a new path, to pursue our most delusional dreams or relax in comfortable, corporate consistency.

In a perfect world, we’d all earn a living doing what we love. Until we get there, we’ll have to make do. Most of us will work boring jobs to cover rent and our eight-dollar iced oat lattes. Our creative passions may, for another year, be unmonetisable. And that’s okay. As Grace says, we have plenty of time. We don’t need to divorce ourselves from our dreams. For now, we just need to try to find joy in, or in spite of, the boring job.

For more on feeling happier at work, try this.