Midlife Crisis: Overall Job Satisfaction In America [Infographic]

There is no question that the state of jobs and job satisfaction has changed in America over the past few decades. When I talk to people in the generation before me, they paint a very different picture of careers and employment in general than what young college graduates will experience today. For example, my father worked at one company pretty much his entire life. Back then, people were loyal to the company they worked for, and companies took care of their employees.

These days, it’s very different. Loyalty on either side is almost non-existent as employees are worried they might be part of the next round of layoffs, and companies try to get away with paying as little as they possibly can…which often means getting rid of older workers in order to hire much younger workers who will work twice as hard for half the money. Job satisfaction is at an all time low, and according to Forbes, the average American will change jobs 7 times over his or her lifetime.

Since we spend so much of our waking hours working, it almost seems like job satisfaction is very closely intertwined with life satisfaction. The only person we can truly count on to make sure we spend our days feeling happy and inspired is our own self, if that makes sense. I guess that is why I’m such a huge advocate of being self-employed, or at least having a side business as a creative outlet.

This Midlife Crisis infographic by graduatedegreeprogram.net (designed by NowSourcing) goes into all this in further detail. If you want even more information about it, you can click over to the source site to see the list of articles they used to gather this information (Forbes, WSJ, etc.). According to this, 71% of American workers are “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” from their work. Physicians apparently experience the most burnout with 48% of them reporting emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and a low sense of personal accomplishment. Ouch!