There are plenty of instances in which you should be proud of your professional accomplishments. And why not, you worked hard for them? You came in early, stayed late, and after months, or even years, of hard work, you finally achieved something important within the context of your insignificant job, and that’s certainly something to hoorah about. But then there are those little moments, those moments of true, unadulterated insignificance, in which there really is no reason to celebrate, or pat yourself on the back, or even reward yourself in any way whatsoever because it was simply your job, and doing your job is not an accomplishment.
If you’ve been working in your position for years without a single promotion or added amount of responsibility, and have been doing the same things for all those years on end, then you’ve accomplished nothing. You can’t substitute the sadness of the monotony of your life as a genuine achievement of you doing something. It might seem like you’ve accomplished, but really, when you boil it down to the nitty-gritty of it all, you’ve just been doing the same ole crap all day everyday for an extended period of time, which, as I said earlier, is just sad. Perhaps getting a promotion and moving on to bigger and better things within your company is an accomplishment, on in which you should be proud and honored of having achieved, no matter the skill level required to do the job, but monotony is never something to be proud of.
With the advent of social media, though, nowadays, everything everyone does and any single moment of the day takes on the air of being an accomplishment, and since a good chunk of your day is spent at work, a lot of those meaningless gestures of life revolve around what you’re doing at work. So, for example, some people might post on Twitter that they got a free bagel because their company had a bagel shop cater their Friday brunch, or something of that nature, and make it out on social media to be a bigger accomplishment than it actually is–which is to say that it’s not an accomplishment in the slightest, it’s barely even worth noting, other than to make a mental note of, ‘Oh, sweet, free bagels today,’ and then dropping it for the rest of your life.
Gone are the days in which every little minutiae of our work lives go unnoticed, and now we’ve been overtaken by the sudden urge to post anything about our lives, including, and especially, what happens at work on a day-t0-day basis. This leads to people post on social media sites about what they had for lunch at work to how they’ve been able to count every tile on the roof of the floor their cubicle is in for the past five days straight, or even that they completed an entire New York Times crossword puzzle over the course of their work day. These accomplishments, though, mean absolutely nothing. They don’t indicate that you’ve done anything productive with your time, and rather point to a larger problem in general with the state of business in modern day.
Perhaps it would be a bit too much to suggest that you should be fired if your only work accomplishment is checking your company email and then mentally clocking out the rest of the day, but then again, no, it probably isn’t too much to say. If you can’t go home each day and say that you accomplished a full day’s worth of work, then you wasted not only your time but the time of your company, your coworkers time that probably had to pick up your slack, and whatever client or consumer that you’re supposedly selling, helping, or servicing in some way, shape, or form. It’s when the bare minimum becomes the standard, that you really need to take a hard look at what you’re doing within your life, no matter what it is you’re taking home each paycheck, and ask yourself if you’ll be proud of what you’ve done by the time you’re in your seventies or eighties and about to croak over at any second. Ask yourself that important question, and then tell me how you’re company-provided panini lunch was the highlight of your job for the past week, month, or year.
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