"Transforming dissatisfaction at work"

A few years ago, I realised I’d slipped into a quiet kind of unhappiness.
Nothing dramatic, just a constant sense that work was heavier than it used to be.
Meetings blurred together. Small frustrations lingered. Even the things I used to enjoy felt dulled.

Looking back, it started around the time I became a manager.
On paper, it should have been a milestone, the reward for years of hard work. But it didn’t feel that way.

I had young kids, a mortgage, responsibilities pulling at me from all directions. And the place I became a manager in was tough. There were two opposing camps: one pushing for rapid change, the other clinging to cautious stability.

I wanted change. The tech stack was creaking, delivery was slow, and I felt the pressure to deliver new features faster. But where to start? Every decision seemed to make someone unhappy. It was confusing, complex, and relentless.

The result was a lot of negative emotion, irritation, fatigue, even guilt. I kept wondering when life would get a little easier. It was supposed to be easier by now. But instead, the difficulty at work seemed to spill into home life.

Around that time, I was reading Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and The Art of Happiness at Work by the Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler. Both books offered a kind of hope, that people can find contentment even in the most difficult circumstances.

But I found it much easier to understand that idea than to live it.
Knowing that contentment was possible didn’t make it any easier to feel.

That’s when I started to see that dissatisfaction isn’t something we can decide to suddenly stop feeling. It’s something we have to sit with, to understand, to learn from, to let soften us rather than harden us.

I didn’t find a single answer, but I started to notice small shifts, moments where the frustration gave way to perspective, and meaning reappeared in the smallest of things.

Maybe that’s what transformation really looks like: not a sudden breakthrough, but a slow, quiet rebalancing between what’s hard and what still matters.

Until next time,
Dermot
​The Messy Middle.

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