u/DPP-Ghost

Many years ago, my ex-partner cheated on me.

To keep a long story short, we had been together for several years before she started sleeping with a colleague during the last four months of our relationship. Another colleague of theirs, who was also a mutual friend of mine, found out and told me. They were all in the same graduate program at a bank, which is how everyone knew everyone. We eventually ended things.

It completely blindsided me. I genuinely had no idea there were any issues in the relationship. Only a few months before I found out, I had taken her and her family, her mother and two younger siblings, away for the weekend to celebrate her 25th birthday.

Anyway, I ended the relationship and never spoke to her again. It has been years now. I am over it and have moved on.

However, we still have a lot of mutual friends, and they dropped a bit of a bombshell on me the other night. Apparently, she and the guy she cheated on me with have been together ever since, on and off. From what I heard, it was never a particularly good relationship, but things escalated badly recently. Badly enough that my ex ended up in hospital, and he was arrested.

And honestly, I do not really know how I am supposed to feel about it, because I feel fine.

I am not going to say she deserved it. I do not think anyone deserves that. But I also cannot pretend I have much sympathy for someone who showed me such a complete lack of empathy and respect when it mattered. When I was told, I had to act like I cared more than I actually did. But deep down, it did not affect me at all.

I slept perfectly fine that night, and I imagine I will keep sleeping perfectly fine.

Does that make me a monster? I don't know. Probably. But it's how I feel.

I see a lot of people say they are miserable because they have to work 40 hours a week, and dread doing it for the rest of their lives.

I think that mindset needs to change.

For most people, work is not meant to be your happy place. It is not there to fulfil every emotional, creative, social, and existential need you have. It is there to pay your bills, give you independence, and fund the life you actually want. Someone has always had to work to provide the life you enjoy. When you were younger, that was probably your parents. But unless you are generationally wealthy, at some point that responsibility becomes yours. It does not disappear just because you would rather be doing something else.

If you find work you genuinely love, great. But that is a bonus, not the standard. A more realistic goal is to find work that pays well, gives you stability, does not ruin your health or relationships, and is something you can tolerate long term. Your fulfilment should come from the life you build outside of work. Work gives you the means to enjoy the people, hobbies, goals, and experiences that actually make life worth living. That is what can make work worth doing.

If work feels unbearable, then yes, improve your situation. Change jobs. Change industries. Retrain. Build skills. But do not expect work to be your entire source of meaning. Build a life outside of work that is worth clocking off for.

Work is much easier to tolerate when it is funding a life you actually want to return to.

Happy Friday, everyone 😊

Edit:

Reading the comments has made me realise I came at this from a pretty narrow perspective.

I do not come from money, and I have had to work hard to get to where I am, but I can also recognise that I am in a position now where I have it pretty good. My job pays me enough, does not completely drain me, and I have enough outside of work that I can separate my job from my sense of meaning.

Not everyone is in that position. Some people are underpaid. Some people are overworked. Some people are mentally or physically exhausted by the end of the day. Some people do not have enough stability, support, time, money, or energy outside of work to simply shrug it off and find meaning elsewhere.

So while I still think there is value in not expecting your job to fulfil every part of your life, I also think I framed it too much as "play the hand you're dealt", rather than asking "how do we shuffle the deck so that the house isn't fucking us over?".

The discussion has been genuinely enlightening. I posted this thinking I might change a few minds, but I think mine has probably changed the most.