You enter the office on Monday to an overflowing inbox and a pile of papers you'd love to toss in the trash. It takes every bit of willpower you possess to stop yourself from turning around and running out the door. You then spend the remainder of your weekdays counting the minutes until Friday.
Finally, Friday arrives. You rush home to enjoy your weekend, but there's one problem: You spend the entirety of it dreading Monday morning. And before you know it, the cycle begins anew.
If this sequence of events sounds familiar, you're not alone. According to a Gallup poll, about 70 percent of the American workforce feels the same way — disengaged in what they do for 40 hours each week.
And I'm sorry, but that's a lot of time to spend doing something that makes you want to rip all of your hair out.
Look, no one expects to love every aspect of their job all day, every day. But most employees straddle the line between being totally indifferent to what they do and completely despising it.
And though society normalizes the idea of hating one's job, we should strive for better. We need to stop blindly accepting that this is "the way things are," especially when workers are genuinely unhappy.
We need to stop sharing those Facebook and Twitter posts, telling us that Monday morning is absolutely meant to be a drag.
We need to stop answering employee complaints with, "Well, this is just the real world. Deal with it."
It shouldn't be a pipe dream to wake up on Monday, excited for the week ahead. Sure, there will be stressful situations throughout the week. There will be times you'll want to crawl under your desk with a bottle of cheap wine. But the overall nature of the work is supposed to eclipse those things.
Workers should be able to drive to work on Monday morning with the certainty that they'll leave on Friday feeling accomplished and fulfilled. They should believe the work they're doing is meaningful.
They should also be working in an environment that supports them. Too many employees are demeaned and belittled by their superiors, the very supervisors who should be working to make their 40 hour week as pleasant as humanly possible.
Office politics don't help either. They're cute and quirky on sitcoms, but the reality is that unnecessary drama leads to even higher stress levels in the workplace.
And with such toxic environments being normalized, how can we be surprised that workers are losing interest?
Society needs to shift its notion of what it means to be an employee. Yes, employees are there to do a specific job. Yes, they should do it to the best of their abilities.
But no, they don't need to be miserable while they're doing it. They shouldn't need to settle for that.
