Seeking Meaning in the Drudgery

In the early years of my career, I was given the task of updating the appendix of huge medical encyclopaedias. I had to add or delete entries while ensuring that the punctuations and spellings were correct. It was a dreadfully boring job.

Yet I was never happier than I was when poring over those pages, zooming into each comma and semi-colon, feeling a sense of achievement after completing each section of tiny text. I revelled in the repetitive numbness of the task and felt purposeful to reach work every day.

This was not a lifelong aspiration. Rather, after a decade of being an unhappy unfree homemaker, I finally had a job in a large organisation. For the first time, I spent time with people outside my family circle, colleagues from around the world. I grew as a woman and as a professional, feeling immense joy and gratitude for being able to do it at all.

Later, I became a copy editor in a magazine, and the chores I secretly enjoyed most were the boring bits – the page-end symbols, the photo captions and pagination, signing off pages to press. The repetitive numbness drove me with ferocity; perfection was a compulsion.

Then I came across this quote by Logan Pearsall Smith: “The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.” It instantly resonated! I did indeed love the drudgery, and decades later, editing is what I do most and still love best.

For those starting out in their careers, apply Smith’s test to see if it’s your true vocation. If you do not feel a ferocious attachment to the drudgery your job involves, it’s probably not your calling. Consider another career – one that pulls you to work every day without any persuasion.

If you are not privileged enough to switch jobs right now – perhaps due to family obligations or even visa or legal constraints – then, instead of feeling stifled, examine the boring bits as an opportunity to explore deeper aspects of yourself. Do the repetitive tasks as a form of meditation. Or view the dull chores that make you feel restless, or even humiliated, as a yoga in self-restraint or as a mental workout in forbearance.

Later, you will look back and realise that the job made you better, stronger, more resilient and even more skilled. You will be invincible precisely because you chose to love the drudgery.

First published in Metro Woman magazine