A note for anyone who worries that jobs in veterinary medicine (or any other field) are getting worse
The things we believe tend to become our reality. For example, if I decide that everyone around me is happier than I am, I’ll start to drift towards the unhappiness my belief has created and VOILA! What I believe has now become my truth. Conversely, if I tell myself that I’m lucky and the world is amazing, I tend to notice things that support this idea and ultimately may come to enjoy my life more.
I have some concerns about this story-into-reality phenomenon in terms of people enjoying their lives in practice (or wherever they happen to work). My perception is that people spending time online may believe that our jobs are becoming uniformly more unpleasant and unfair. My worry is that this perception may be leading people to believe that everyone’s jobs are worse than they are, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of dissatisfaction.
As I think about why a bias towards perceiving jobs in our industry negatively may exist, I can’t help but reflect on a podcast I recently heard where Pete Buttigieg was asked why the government doesn’t get more done. His response was that the government actually gets a lot done, but we don’t hear about it. He said that, for example, if a government project creates a beautiful, useful, well-made, job-creating, local-economy-supporting new bridge, no one talks about it. Articles don’t get written that say “look at this simple, good thing!” Social media posts about the existence of the bridge don’t get celebrated or go viral. Politicians who point to the goodness of this tangible outcome simply get ignored.
If you’re going to do good work and you want to get attention for that work, Buttigieg said, the best thing you can hope for is that the other political party tries to take credit. If they do that you can fight with them and call them liars. Only then will anyone pay attention to your successful bridge project. (Quick note: please do not email me your thoughts on Pete Buttigieg. Just imagine I agree with you and enjoy your day.)
I think this take on what people pay attention to is both sad and true, and it extends well beyond politics. We don’t hear about things that simply work, and I think that includes our jobs. There is no doubt in my mind that if I wanted to tell the world my job has ups and downs but is overall pretty good, I would have a very hard time getting anyone to care or help spread the word. However, if I was hugely unhappy with my employer, I suspect I could find an eager audience ready to hear the lurid details of how I felt I had been wronged.
There is no doubt that some people face genuine difficulties and unfair conditions in their practices. However, I think the disproportionate interest in things going badly (especially if they cause juicy interpersonal conflict) versus things going well paints a strange online picture of what work is really like in our profession.
We read continuously about job frustrations, and almost never about job satisfaction. That’s not just in the veterinary industry, mind you. It’s in every industry across the board.
To make the picture even a bit more skewed, we live in a society where employers are strongly discouraged from discussing their present and past employees in public. The risks of sharing information about a current or past worker include legal action, reputational damage for the company, and ticking off all of your other employees.
Therefore, publicly responding to an unhappy employee’s perception of unfair treatment with an opposing viewpoint is just not a good decision for an employer to make. I’m not saying that whenever an employee and employer disagree about the culture of a workplace the employer’s side of the story should be given more weight. I am simply pointing out that when employees and employers argue about a job, it’s usually not the employee who is saying this job is actually quite good. Usually, the employee is going to have a negative opinion of the job and the employer is going to be silent.
To be clear, I think these public discussion limitations on companies are a good thing. This employer silence does, however, mean that online conversations about work frustrations are typically very one-sided presentations.
I don’t say this to cast doubt on the public complaints that anyone has ever made about their job. Also, if you are unhappy at work or if your employer is mistreating you, then I am not here to invalidate that experience. This observation is about online discourse, and isn’t meant to diminish the very real and valid frustrations many individuals experience. The point is only to call out the fact that what we see online isn’t always the full story.
Therefore, I want to put forward the idea that maybe most people’s jobs in veterinary medicine are, in fact, actually pretty good – or at least no worse than before. If your job is decidedly bad, I hope you will be able to navigate that situation and make your job either better or different. If you’re on the fence about whether your job is good or not, perhaps it would be helpful to tell yourself it’s pretty good and then look for support for that position. You might just end up creating a role you are happy to have.
