Why Work Sucks
And Why it Doesn't Have To
“The best way to appreciate your job is to imagine yourself without one.” — Oscar Wilde
I grew up going to a Catholic school where we routinely talked about Adam and Eve’s “fall” in the Garden of Eden—consequences of which included an inclination toward sin and separation from God. However, the part of this story that stuck with me the most was the idea that Adam was sentenced to “a life of toil by the sweat of his brow.” Basically, he was told that “work sucks” and that he and all of his Sisyphean descendants would be stuck pushing a proverbial boulder up a hill until they were relieved of their duty—either by death or social security… or something like that.
But this isn’t just a Bible story, fable, or figment of my imagination. Most people today think work sucks, and that’s because for many people, it does. Only half of workers in the U.S. are satisfied or very satisfied with their jobs.1 One in five workers globally report symptoms of burnout.2 And to add fatal insult to injury, recent research from the International Labour Organization (ILO) shows that workplace psychosocial factors account for approximately 840,000 deaths per year.3
In fact, work sucks enough to have a Reddit thread titled, “Work simply sucks” in the r/jobs subreddit. I asked ChatGPT to summarize it and this is what I got:
Work sucks because you don’t control your time, it often feels meaningless, and it never actually ends.
Well, it turns out there may be some merit to this statement (particularly for knowledge workers). Not because work is inherently miserable or because we’re uniquely bad at it—but because of how work is designed.
A model for understanding work experience
The Job Demands–Resources (JD-R) model provides a useful lens for understanding work experience by identifying two simultaneous forces that shape our day-to-day: job demands and job resources.4 Demands are the physical, cognitive, and emotional requirements of the job—things like workload, time pressure, role ambiguity, and toxic behavior. Job resources are the factors that enable performance and buffer stress—autonomy, support from coworkers, adaptability, and access to health resources at work, to name a few.5
Importantly, the model describes two simultaneous processes. First, the stress process, where excessive or chronic demands lead to strain, disengagement, and burnout. Second, the motivational process, where resources help us achieve goals, buffer demands, and/or develop new skills and abilities. In other words, different aspects of work are associated with different outcomes—the things that drive burnout are different than the things that drive health.
In support of this, McKinsey Health Institute (MHI) research shows that job resources are 14x more predictive of holistic health than demands while job demands are 7x more predictive of burnout than job resources.6
Work sucks when we are resource-light, demand-heavy, or both at the same time. In fact, the same MHI research shows that over half of the population finds themselves in some combination of these circumstances. Said another way, over 60% of the world’s population over the age of 15 is employed, and yet approximately half of these people experience work as a health-degrading, not health-promoting activity.
Whether work is your higher calling or simply a paycheck to keep the lights on, it ought to be a life-giving experience. Thankfully, knowing why work sucks in the first place gives us the knowledge to help make this the case.
Work is a system, not a circumstance
Many of the most taxing demands sit at the job and team levels: toxic behavior from managers, lack of clarity on what our role is, and physical demands like long hours or manual labor. At the same time, the resources that would buffer these demands—autonomy, flexibility, supportive teams, meaningful work, and skills such as adaptability—are often constrained, under-developed, and/or inconsistently applied.
The result is a predictable collision of high demands, insufficient resources, and chronic strain, which makes the Reddit summary feel less like cynicism and more like the predetermined outcome. Work sucks because you don’t control your time, the work feels meaningless, and it never ends.
The notion that work sucks is one that is often sold as an obvious fact rather than a malleable outcome. But this need not be the case. As Edwards Deming is often credited with saying, “every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does,” and this is exactly the case for our jobs. The extent to which your work sucks at any given moment is a product of the balance between the resources and demands you are experiencing.
So perhaps when we talk about balance in the context of work, we ought to reframe balance from a symmetrical outcome of hours worked to a reasonable equilibrium of resources and demands.
Stepwise Strategies
While some of these aspects, like toxic behavior, physical demands, and access to health resources may be uncontrollable and subject to the behavior of a manager, nature of a role, or culture of your company, there are steps we can take to make work better. More to come on this in an upcoming newsletter, but for now, here’s a list to get started:
Be a good boss
Develop resilience and adaptability
Seek out new things to learn
Make friends at work
For more information on the factors that drive health and burnout, see: “Reframing employee health: Moving beyond burnout to holistic health”
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Image credit: ChatGPT
Pew Research Center. (2024, December 10). Americans’ job satisfaction in 2024. Read report
Brassey, J., Herbig, B., Jeffery, B., & Ungerman, D. (2023, November 2). Reframing employee health: Moving beyond burnout to holistic health. McKinsey Health Institute. https://www.mckinsey.com/mhi/our-insights/reframing-employee-health-moving-beyond-burnout-to-holistic-health
International Labour Organization. (2024). 840,000 deaths a year linked to psychosocial risks at work. https://www.ilo.org/resource/news/840000-deaths-year-linked-psychosocial-risks-work
Demerouti, E., Bakker, A. B., Nachreiner, F., & Schaufeli, W. B. (2001). The job demands-resources model of burnout. The Journal of applied psychology, 86(3), 499–512.
Schaufeli, W. B. (2017). Applying the Job Demands-Resources model: A “how to” guide to measuring and tackling work engagement and burnout. Organizational Dynamics, 46(2), 120–132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orgdyn.2017.04.008
Brassey, J., Herbig, B., Jeffery, B., & Ungerman, D. (2023, November 2). Reframing employee health: Moving beyond burnout to holistic health. McKinsey Health Institute. https://www.mckinsey.com/mhi/our-insights/reframing-employee-health-moving-beyond-burnout-to-holistic-health