What will it take to ‘love my job’ again?

It feels as though the whole system is broken. The other day, I saw a colleague post a lovely picture online of some place where they’re doing fieldwork, with the caption ‘love my job’, and I realised that I haven’t heard anyone in HE say that in *years*. In fact, it’s something I used to say myself. That was before my workload plan was at 112% (a number which certainly doesn’t capture all the work I *actually* do), my admin role was enormous and unworkable due to the endless institutional barriers placed in my way to doing it effectively, there was incredibly low morale across the whole sector but also within my institution, and the only way to do my job became a working week of 55 hours minimum. And I’m very conscious of the fact that I can keep my head above water because I don’t currently have caring commitments, which means I can work 11-hour days Mon-Fri and have the weekends off. Most of my colleagues have to work at least some of the weekend because they have other responsibilities which mean they can’t work as much as I do in the week. But I’m burnt out, even having 2 days out of 7 off….partly because those 5 days are exhausting and partly because I spend every weekend feeling anxious, frustrated, and miserable. So how do my colleagues with kids and aging parents cope?

I’ve started to think seriously about leaving HE, which makes me so sad; if it wasn’t for the metrics, the ridiculously short-sighted and ignorant impositions from government, the inflexibility of senior management (who ultimately have to make all decisions based on income) and the widespread acceptance that inequalities within the sector are inevitable, I would still ‘love my job’. I love working with students, I love doing my research, I love the opportunities to work with colleagues in my field on projects that excite me, sometimes involving travel to interesting places for conferences. And I don’t want to lose any of these things, as they’re impossible to do outside of academia. And I worked SO HARD to get here, both in terms of gaining my PhD and all the hoops I’ve jumped through to land a permanent position at a prestigious university. But I don’t think I can carry on working in a broken system where I’m being told to just accept that things will get more broken before they get better – and no clear sign that they ever *will* get better. God, it’s depressing.