Working on Purpose

How to find happiness at work

Author: Ellen Scott

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24th November 2025

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Description

Quiet quitting, bare minimum Mondays, resenteeism, pointless meetings, toxic bosses, the anti-work movement, the great resignation, the death of the dream job, the death of the career. We're in a moment where our relationship with work is seriously negative. The dream of work-life balance feels further out of reach than ever. We're recovering from the damage wrought by the overworking ideals promoted by the leaning in, hustle culture, girl boss era, and desperately trying to claw back some sense of control by reclaiming our time, energy, and effort, each new buzzword giving us hope that we might be able to make work less miserable.

But each work trend, each attempt to restore the balance, is coming at the problem all wrong. We've lost any hope that work can be anything other than a pain, and so lean on productivity hacks and boundary-setting to at least stave off the looming wave of burnout. As a result, many of us teeter between working too hard or hardly working, burnout or boreout, productivity paranoia and total apathy. According to Gallup data, Gen Z are the most disengaged group at work. Ask a twenty-something for their perfect job and they're more than likely to respond that they don't dream of labour. Nobody wants to work anymore, the managers and boomers say. They're right; and fair enough. Who would want to work when we've defined work as inherently bleak?

How did we get here? And how do we get out?

Working On Purpose promises to not only reduce the misery of work, but instead to actually help us find joy in it. Covering topics from the generation gap and identifying what type of worker you are to the importance of how we use our non-work time, it will combine expertise and data with personal experience, case studies, practical exercises and work hacks to be the reference point for anyone who wants to make their work life better.

About the Author

Ellen Scott is acting digital content director for Stylist magazine. Alongside this, she writes the Working On Purpose newsletter and has co-hosted the hugely popular Eat Sleep Work Repeat podcast with Bruce Daisley and Matthew Cook. She was previously the lifestyle and weekend editor at Metro.