Ancillary #6

Despite the fact that an individual’s salary can define one’s quality of life, the COVID 19 pandemic has opened the eyes of Americans across the nation, showing them that job satisfaction is more important because it provides a more well balanced life. In lieu of the countless quarantines and everyone being forced to work from home, thousands of Americans have realized that at the end of the day, being happy and healthy is more important than getting a big paycheck for a job you hate doing. In 2020, before the pandemic, 80% of Americans reported feeling that they had “too many things to do and not enough time to do them” (CQ Researcher). On average Americans work 47 hours with approximately 18% working over 60 hours a week to make ends meet. According to Dorie Clark, a professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the Columbia Business School in New York, “COVID affected everyone in the sense of causing us to question our priorities in life and examine what we’re doing and whether we might want to make changes.” Because of the shift in the way work was conducted during the pandemic, people were given time to think about their professional lives and where they fit into the greater context of their community; what they like or what they don’t like. With that being said, many Americans came to the realization that change needed to occur. With countless lives being threatened, the idea of continuing a job you don’t enjoy seems pointless and not worth wasting the precious time people have being alive. Pursuing a job you are passionate or interested in also fosters more authentic work that will mean more when produced. Loving what you do is integral to producing quality work that has the potential to change the world. Not only that, but it also promotes positive mental health, happy person, better quality of work.