My first job was in a box factory. The place eventually turned into a warehouse, but making boxes gave me my first paycheque.

It was also my first exposure to co-workers who do nothing but complain. As a young person with their first job, I kept my mouth shut and kept to my work.

However, what is interesting is that every job I’ve held since then, those same co-workers have been there in different forms. They’re not complaining about unsafe working conditions or employers breaking labour laws—they’re complaining about the grind.

I periodically got sucked into that crowd despite my dad’s (still) great advice to “keep your work at work” and “nobody wants to hear you complain.”

Today there are a spectrum of complaints with unreasonable demands on one end and feeling the work is beneath people on the other.

The one end of unreasonable demands certainly needs addressing as employers sometimes forget they’re hiring people, not robots that can be programmed. Of course, this comes with its own complexities and as you venture into the swamp of what is actually unreasonable, things get tricky.

However, it’s the latter end of the spectrum to which I say,

You’re a small person with a big ego. Learn to do the grind.