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F R O M T H E C E O 81,396 hours. That's how much of life most of us spend working. 1 The only thing we spend more time doing is sleeping. If we spend so much of life at work, how is life at work going? According to the world's workers, not well. Gallup finds 60% of people are emotionally detached at work and 19% are miserable. 2 But is that a surprise, or a statistical explanation of the obvious? The idea that "work sucks" is everywhere. It's been the subject of ancient philosophers, world leaders, your colleagues and even pop culture. Comedian George Carlin once quipped, "Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar." Carlin's joke works because it's true — but workplace misery isn't funny. Being miserable at work can bring more suffering to a person's life than being unemployed. The False Workplace Proverb "Find a job that you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work again in your life." This quote is often misattributed to Mark Twain or Confucius. 3 But regardless of where it came from, the popular adage has a different problem: It's not true. "Work," according to Oxford Languages, is "activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result." Exerting mental or physical effort to achieve anything is rarely done without stress, worry or even pain. Nobel laureate and best-selling author Daniel Kahneman once said there were "periods when he worked alone on writing that were 'terrible,' when he felt 'miserable.'" Stress, anxiety and maybe a little pain will always be part of a high-performing job, but those negative emotions cannot be the very soul of someone's job. Yet, that is exactly the work- life experience for the 19% of workers who are actively disengaged. 1 According to the Gallup World Poll, the average full-time worker spends 41.36 hours per week working. If you assume people work 48 weeks per year, it means people spend 1,985.28 hours per year working. Life expectancy is 73 and, according to the OECD, people retire at about 63. If people begin working at 22, then the average person works 41 years. Forty-one years of work at 1,985.28 hours per year is 81,396 total hours. This estimate is conservative and may even be low; another estimate finds that people work over 115,000 hours in a lifetime. 2 Gallup's technical term for being miserable at work is "actively disengaged." The terms for thriving at work and emotionally detached at work are "engaged" and "not engaged." 3 It first appeared in the 1982 Princeton Alumni Weekly. The periodical quoted a Princeton professor, quoting some "old-timer" he knew (thanks, Quote Investigator). Copyright © 2022 Gallup, Inc. All rights reserved. SOGW_Letter_2022 2 State of the Global Workplace: 2022 Report