Do you hit the snooze button a million times every morning? Do you count down the minutes until the end of the work day? Do you ever think: “There must be a better way!”
Evans Prater feels your pain. He recently completed an internship at a successful media group, during which he ended up in the hospital with stress-related chest pain -- twice.
Though he’d expected the internship to be his door to a high-paying and prestigious career, he was surprised by just how much he hated it.
“I constantly felt trapped and longed to just be outside,” Prater writes for Elite Daily. “I frequently wondered how people do this for the better part of their adult lives. I couldn’t get over how this, to me, was not living. In fact, it was the opposite of living. I felt like I was dying.”
So Prater decided to leave the busy world of corporate life, accepting a job leading wilderness trips for troubled youth. Changing careers may not lead to a bigger paycheck, but in this case, it’s a vote for sanity and work/life balance.
How he changed his career -- and his lifestyle
Prater will be taking a pay cut, but he’s not exactly “going back to the bottom of the food chain,” as he says in the article -- he’ll be making a difference in the lives of kids, doing the meaningful work that Millennials especially crave.
Here’s why Prater is fine with leaving the corporate world:
The stress isn’t worth it: Prater says his colleagues were constantly overworked and overstressed -- as was he. Simply put, he is over our culture’s “obsession with workaholism.”
The 40-hour work week is antiquated: As we’ve written about before, working more can actually lead to less productivity. Like Prater, more and more Millennials want to be measured by their output, rather than their hours logged. (A big reason why they’re attracted to remote work, or companies like this one, which offers a four-day workweek.)
There has to be a better way: Prater says it’s up to millennials to stop the cycle of stress and exhaustion; in its place, he envisions a world of “people sitting outside in the sunshine, enjoying some coffee, while answering their morning e-mails.” To that end, he’s started to line up freelance jobs he can do remotely.
If Prater’s struggles -- and hopes -- sound familiar, it’s high time for you to start exploring other career options. Here are some posts that may help:
- Work From Home Jobs: The Ultimate Guide to Getting Hired by a Virtual Company
- Last Year of College? Forget the Job Hunt and Start Freelancing Instead
- The Ultimate Guide to Landing a Seasonal Job (and Using It to Travel the World)
- Desperate for a Career Change? How to Start Over With Zero Experience
- How to Convince Your Boss to Let You Go Virtual
- Need a Career Break? Try a Working Sabbatical
