Having run out of cooking reveals to have a look at with my post-work crisps, I’ve taken to simply watching what’s on TV, which is generally A New Life within the Solar: The place Are They Now? and Château DIY. Each function British individuals who have made radical adjustments, dwelling out their desires with wildly various levels of competence and success, principally working eating places, wedding ceremony venues, gites or inventive retreats in idyllic areas.
There’s a motive these reveals air within the early night, as we shut our laptops with a defeated clunk or get dwelling after one other terrible commute: they’re promoting the notion that one other life is feasible. Solely the very lucky, or pathologically constructive, wash up on the couch at 6.30pm each day with the clear-eyed, full-hearted certainty that they’ve spent the day doing exactly what they have been placed on earth to do with their wild, treasured lives.
I used to be desirous about this as I examine Good Housekeeping’s recent survey, by which two-thirds of girls mentioned they’d change profession: 31% “dream in regards to the risk” and 34% “are open to pivoting”. This appears low – did they conduct this survey on payday, or are GH readers a very glass-half-full breed? Don’t all of us really feel this? Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace report confirmed a decline in worker engagement and wellbeing, with 79% (87% in Europe) both not engaged or “actively disengaged” and solely 33% of workers score themselves as “thriving”. We’re, globally, not tremendous into our jobs.
I don’t need a new life within the solar – I concern the fiery orb virtually as a lot as I concern altering cover covers, which appears to represent an unacceptably massive a part of most televised new begins I’ve seen – however I do sometimes think about a special life (someplace with reliably heavy cloud cowl) and job. Not that mine is dangerous. A buddy as soon as examine working circumstances in Nigerian sawmills and it turned our shorthand for work infinitely worse than ours. Sitting in a supportive chair, a cup of tea by my elbow, typing, with frequent breaks to play with the hens or stare into the fridge is as removed from the Nigerian sawmill as you will get. I’ve nothing to complain about and I’m not complaining. I simply typically really feel incompetent and anxious and – when you can consider it – barely pointless.
Like everybody (proper?), I’ve parallel-life jobs that a bit of late-night voice in my head whispers I might maybe have loved extra, or been higher at: archaeologist or translator; artwork historian or wildlife rehabber. Then there are the fantastical ones, that I’m temperamentally unsuited to and don’t have any expertise for however want it have been in any other case: opera singer, skilled aesthete, Zadie Smith, the pope. Not like 45% of the Good Housekeeping survey respondents, I don’t want a greater work/life stability however, like 43% of them, I typically suppose I could possibly be doing one thing extra significant, and may take pleasure in a brand new problem (40%), say, issuing fashion diktats or papal encyclicals.
However, however, however. As anybody who has tried to get a job just lately will inform us wistful wonderers, the grass could also be greener, however good luck attending to it. The employment market is horrible, with UK unemployment at its highest in four years. Alternatives and charges are being hollowed out by artificial intelligence, particularly in creative industries – and that applies equally, if no more, to freelancers. Then there are the more and more dehumanising and absurd hiring protocols – AI “applicant tracking systems” screening CVs, interminable selection processes imposed by employers emboldened by a purchaser’s market, chatbot interviews – probably baking in bias and discrimination.
I believe we principally know that, simply as we all know that even dream jobs are simply jobs some days. Answering a Good Housekeeping survey or watching New Lives within the Solar provide a protected house to dream a bit of. I’ve began treating the present as a delicate nightly public service: a reminder that dumping the nine-to-five to dwell your dream might contain ant infestations, floods, labyrinthine native rules, loneliness or dry rot. May issues be higher? Probably. May they be worse? Completely. Would they most probably be kind of the identical, however completely different? Yeah, in all probability.