Kasey Edwards - Thirty Something And Over It: What Happens When You Wake Up and No Longer Want to Go To Work

Have you ever woken up and realised that you didnt want to go to work?

I dont mean you had a big night and wanted to sleep in, or youve got a boring day of meetings ahead of you which you cant be stuffed sitting through, or youd just prefer to take your dog to the beach instead. Im not talking about mild discontent either. Im talking about being over it completely and utterly over it.

I dont know how it happened. I didnt see it coming, but almost overnight I didnt want to go to work anymore not just on that day, but ever again.

This was a shocking revelation to me. Id always been one of those ambitious over-achievers with something to prove. For the last ten years Id slavishly climbed the corporate ladder, loving every rung of it. Id kept every business card from every job Id ever had as scalps of my conquests, with my latest card carrying the title of Senior Change Management Consultant. As a change manager, I spent my days advising clients on how to make their employees more efficient and compliant. The prefix senior on my business card meant that sometimes the clients even listened to my advice. But it was only now that I realised that the ladder which had been so important to climb wasnt leading anywhere in particular, only further away from where I had started.

I had everything Id always wanted a successful career and the lifestyle and assets to match. But all of a sudden my job didnt seem that challenging or glamorous. The role Id been playing of high-powered businesswoman felt inauthentic and disingenuous, and my whole lifestyle had lost its zing. Id lost my reason to get out of bed in the morning, and I felt like Id lost a part of me along with it.

Right about now would be a good time to accuse me of being a poor little rich girl. What on earth did I have to complain about? I was in my thirties, educated, middle-class and white, which was pretty much a passport to whatever I wanted. Sure, I was a woman, and almost as short as Kylie Minogue without the arse to compensate, but other than that, all the cards were stacked in my favour.

I know that on the scale of world hunger and breast cancer, this thirty-something crisis doesnt even register. I also know that it is a luxury for me even to contemplate the concept of job satisfaction when most of the world is working merely to stay alive. But despite feeling indulgent and that my complaints were unjustified, I was terrified at the prospect of working for the next thirty years in a state of unfulfilled monotony.

I needed to discover why Id lost my give-a-shit and what I could do to find it again. Over the course of a year, I read books, spoke to experts, talked to people like me and to people not like me, and dabbled in a whole range of escapist and dysfunctional behaviour. When I started this journey I feared I was the only one who felt like this. But once I came out of the closet and admitted I was over it, I was amazed and relieved when other people confessed they felt the same. Before long it seemed that everybody I met was also in the throes of their own private thrisis a thirty-something crisis. The only difference between them and me was that Id stopped being private about it. I was truly shocked by the number of people who had lost their ambition and sense of meaning in their work, but spent their lives pretending that they hadnt.

Along the way I realised that all the things I thought were hard in my life like climbing the corporate ladder, working long hours, getting my education were in fact relatively easy. The really hard thing was stepping off the treadmill, taking an honest look at myself and my life, and asking who I really was and what I really wanted.

I realised that losing my give-a-shit about work was not a failure or anything to feel embarrassed or ashamed of. In fact, being thirty-something and over it was actually the next rung on the ladder of life that I needed to climb and conquer. This is my story about being thirty-something and over it. Im not an expert, and I certainly dont have all the answers. But if youre thirty-something and over it and find yourself wondering what its all about, at the very least I hope this book will help you realise that other people are as fucked up as you.