In a world where even being the Pope isn’t necessarily a lifetime job, can any of us hope to put in our thirty years and retire with our gold watch?
Of course we all know that the answer is no, but the good news is that maybe we shouldn’t want the same job for our whole lives, anyway. Here’s why:
1. You’d Have to Work With Jerks
As Alex Schmidt over at Cracked points out, no matter how wonderful the majority of your colleagues are, there’s always one person you can’t stand. (He says it in a more colorful way, but the upshot is the same.)
Think about working with that one horrible coworker for the next few decades. It’s like an episode of “The Twilight Zone,” where hell is your office and the devil is the person who will not stop eating split-pea soup two inches from your right elbow. At least if you get a new job every few years, you get new types of jerky coworkers. After all, a change is as good as a rest.
2. Your Job Can Change — and Not Always for the Better
Think about the gig you’ve had the longest. If you held down the job for a number of years, chances are your duties changed a lot from the time you signed the paperwork until the time you planned your goodbye drinks. If you’re lucky, you got promoted, received a raise, and climbed ye olde corporate ladder to bigger and better things. If you’re not so lucky, you didn’t get any of that fun stuff, but you got a heck of a lot more work as time went on.
Call it the law of Corporate Entropy: the longer you stay at a company, the more jobs you’ll wind up doing, until you gradually decline into disorder. And chances are, none of your old duties will ever, ever go away.
3. You’d Get Bored
For a variety of reasons, it’s easy to become complacent if you stay at the same place for too long. Sure, the specifics of your job change, but the way your coworkers view you might not evolve at the same rate. And at many organizations these days, the opportunity for advancement is limited by the fact that people are less willing to leave a comfortable position to take a chance on a new, possibly less certain job.
Which means that in order to get promoted, you’d pretty much have hope your boss gets fired. And that’s just bad karma.
Tell Us What You Think
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(Photo Credit: Seattle Municipal Archives/Flickr)
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