Episode 22: God, I Hate This... Don't I?

Anger can feel clear.

But sometimes the thing we think we hate is only part of the story.

In this episode, Bob talks about burnout, frustration, and the uncomfortable moment when a long-held assumption starts to crack. What if the anger is real… but the target is less clear than we thought?

This is a conversation about work, resentment, perspective, and learning to ask a better question before we stay too long, walk away too fast, or burn the whole thing down.

Episode 22: God, I Hate This… Don’t I?

Take what works. Leave what doesn’t. Choose — and keep moving.

If this hit, share it with someone who needs to hear it. 

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Presented by Madison’s Path
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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I run trains for a living. For a long time I've said something that's that's pretty simple. I hate my job. Recently I had an experience though that made me wonder if that sentence might have been a bit too simple. Not wrong exactly, just incomplete.

SPEAKER_00 0:20

And that bothered me.

SPEAKER_01 0:23

Because when you've been carrying anger towards something for a long time, it feels right, it feels clean, it feels simple, it feels settled. You stop questioning it, you stop separating the pieces, and you just you just know the feeling. For a few hours, though, recently I had the opportunity to be around trains without all the other stuff that was attached to them. And I realized something that really kind of bothered me. A lot more than I expected, to be honest. Maybe I don't hate running trains. Maybe I hate what the system around the work has done to my relationship with that. And then that got me thinking, because that's what I do.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

How many other things are we misdiagnosing the same way?

SPEAKER_01 1:16

How many times do we decide something's dead? Because we can't separate the thing from the environment that poisoned it. Before we walk away, before we stay too long, before we burn the whole damn thing down, maybe there's a better question we need to ask. Am I sure I know what I'm angry at? Welcome to the Man in Motion Podcast, episode twenty two. God, I hate this. Don't I? I'm Bob. This is a show about what it means to be a man in today's world, navigating real life with strength, purpose, and clarity. No hypes, no hacks, no fixing yourself, just awareness, responsibility, and choosing direction while you're in motion. No excuses ever forward.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

How many times have you said that? I hate my job. You know, anytime we say I hate this, it's very emotionally clear. But it's not always accurate. It's not clear enough to guide your next move. Because I hate this is usually honest. But when you're starting to figure out your feelings on something, that might be the only sentence that's there to start with. And that usually comes from exhaustion, it comes from frustration, disappointment, anger, and the ever-present burnout. But then the problem is we often stop there. We stop at that. We stop at that sentence.

SPEAKER_01 3:21

Anger, and especially anger that's been carried for a while, it feels very simple. Very sh we think it's honest, but it it compresses everything into one pile. The work, the people, the environment, the pressure, the version of you that has to show up there.

SPEAKER_00 3:42

It all gets thrown in together. And eventually we cover the whole damn thing with one blanket that's labeled I hate this. But is that label really clean? Is it really accurate? You know blanket diagnosises like that. Blanket statements like that. Create blanket choices.

SPEAKER_01 4:20

And it might lead you to do something that you regret. If you misread the problem, you're going to choose the wrong response. You may quit something that still really matters to you. You might stay loyal to something that's poisoning you. You might blame the work when the environment is the issue, or you might blame yourself when the structure around you is broken.

SPEAKER_00 4:47

And that's why this question matters. Am I sure I know what I'm angry at?

SPEAKER_01 4:56

Because I thought I knew. I thought the answer was as simple as the nose on my face. I run for uh break. I run trains for a living, and I thought I hated the railroad. Recently, like I said, I had a moment that complicated that for me. And I didn't realize how much I had thrown into that one bucket until I saw a piece of that outside of the bucket.

SPEAKER_00 5:25

Let me tell you a story here.

SPEAKER_01 5:28

Recently, a friend of mine uh had his 50th birthday. Big event. Um very good friend of mine. I've known him for a long time. Uh, and he is an unabashed rail fan. And for his birthday, he rented out a steam train. Um, a private dinner event on a steam train. And then after dinner, we had bourbon and cigars. Um, pretty pretty big to do. Steam train running back and forth across some section of tracks, gorgeous area. The scenery was amazing, and it was a private afternoon event. It was an amazing afternoon. I I can't say anything other than that. It was it was a great time, great friends, great food, great cigars, great bourbon. Um and I got to experience trains away from my daily environment. And I'll grant you, you know, there's there's the element of history involved because steam engines are very historic, and you know, I am a history nerd, but it was still trains. And not the kind of thing I would ever have done before. I'm not I'm not a rail fan, you know, from a visual perspective. I can understand that trains are very dynamic and and uh picture-wise, they have great composition and things like that, but the actual trains themselves hold no real allure for me. And other than the fact that I appreciated the mechanicalness and frankly the ingenuity and the engineering of these old steam engines, the thought of shoveling coal for hours on end just makes me cringe, quite frankly. But here I am. I'm I'm in this environment and I'm surrounded by the same kind of thing that I do for a living, but it wasn't the same thing. There was no daily grind, there was no institutional weight on top of it, there was no broken system slapping me over the head, there's no exhaustion around uh uh involved in the experience.

SPEAKER_00 7:53

I'm not being beaten down with timetables and rules, and it was about the machine, the movement, the craft of of these people moving the train, and a bunch of people that wanted to be there. And again, I'm I I'm still not a rail fan. Like, but for the first time in a while, first time ever really, I understood what they were seeing. I can understand now why this stuff captures people.

SPEAKER_01 8:33

You know, as we we were going down the tracks and sitting there smoking a cigar with a glass of bourbon, looking at these these people that are lined up along the tracks and at road crossings and taking pictures and cheering and bringing their children and their grandchildren and I got it.

SPEAKER_00 8:56

Like I get it.

SPEAKER_01 9:03

And for the first time, I could see that their love for trains was not the same thing as my frustration. And it created enough distance in the experience for me to see my own reaction differently.

SPEAKER_00 9:27

And I realized something I had been telling myself I hated. Won't say I love it, but I don't hate it. Running trains is not what I hate. I'm not going to go into specifics here because my employer has a much larger legal department than I do. What I've come to realize is that the work itself for me is not the problem. The system around the work might be what have poisoned it.

SPEAKER_01 10:17

It's the environment has trained me to resent the thing attached to it.

SPEAKER_00 10:26

And honestly, that made me even angrier because it makes my anger more complicated.

SPEAKER_01 10:34

And I might have wasted 20 years of my life being angry at something that is misplaced, or at least not accurate. The target for that anger is much less clear than I thought. I'm not saying an afternoon riding a steam train erased my burnout. I'm not saying it magically fixed everything.

SPEAKER_00 10:59

Did not make the system I work in less broken. But it gave me some perspective and allowed me to separate the parts that I hate from the parts that I don't. And that matters. That distinction matters. It changes things a lot.

SPEAKER_01 11:43

The thing itself and the system wrapped around it are not always the same thing. And I know many of you are sitting here going, what the hell does this have to do with me? I don't even know what a train looks like. This isn't about trains.

SPEAKER_00 11:57

It's about looking at the thing you hate. And deciding, is it the whole thing that you hate?

SPEAKER_01 12:07

Is it a piece of it that I hate? And the rest of it I'm either ambivalent to, or maybe you even loved it. Because most of the time the things that we hate started out as things that we love.

SPEAKER_00 12:20

And are we letting one aspect of that poison the entire thing? You know, the work is one thing.

SPEAKER_01 12:33

Or the activity or the whatever. The whatever is one thing. The environment is another. The craft involved in doing it, the institution surrounding all of this, the responsibility, the way that that responsibility is managed, abused, or unsupported by others, they're all very separate things.

SPEAKER_00 12:56

And if you can separate them, if you can break them apart, suddenly that burnout. There's there's something there that you can affect. It's much smaller than you realize. It's much more manageable. Especially if it's something you have to go to every day.

SPEAKER_01 13:37

I know a lot of people hate their jobs. And that is probably the saddest part of reality that I know of. Because when you can get up in the morning and love what you go do, you never work a day in your life. You're literally getting paid to do something you love. Those people are the lucky ones.

SPEAKER_00 13:58

They really are. They are the people that I am jealous of. The rest of us, if you can separate those things, if you can separate the idea of this is what I hate, and take that blanket away and find the piece of it that's actually poisoning it. And you're able to take something that used to bring you joy and make it bring you joy again. What is that going to do for your life? You're able to separate the system from the experience. The pressure that changes how the work feels is going to take on a different aspect.

SPEAKER_01 14:57

It's going to allow you to separate the dysfunction from the thing itself.

SPEAKER_00 15:03

It's going to allow you to separate the exhaustion from the rest of your reaction. And it could lead you to some interesting places. Because maybe you're going to realize.

SPEAKER_01 15:17

Maybe I don't hate helping. Maybe I hate being used.

SPEAKER_00 15:22

Maybe I don't hate responsibility. Maybe I hate carrying it unsupported. Maybe you don't hate the calling. Maybe you hate whatever container it got trapped inside of. Or you could stay loyal to something that's slowly killing you. You know, you may burn the whole damn thing to the ground when realistically there's only a small part that needs to change. And you keep carrying anger without knowing where it belongs. I'm not saying your anger's wrong. And I'm not saying you should stay. And I'm not telling you to run. That doesn't mean the system that's poisoning the thing is wrong.

SPEAKER_01 16:50

Doesn't mean the system is harmless either.

SPEAKER_00 16:53

What I'm saying is that your diagnosis, where you're aiming that anger, has to get sharper. Because once you realize that, you can look at it clearly and say, what part of this still matters? Because sometimes the thing still does matter, but it's the container that it's surrounded in that makes it impossible.

SPEAKER_01 17:34

But the other problem with these blanket diagnoses is that they can lead us to places where you're either staying too long in a situation because you love this thing, even though there's a part of it that's killing you slowly. But we stay loyal to it because, well, I love this. But over time, that part that's killing you slowly, that damage adds up. It still matters. And we get to a point where we start confusing endurance with purpose. And we we tell ourselves it's the same bullshit line. It's all this is just what the work requires. Such horseshit.

SPEAKER_00 18:23

You know, in the opposite end of the spectrum. We might love something. And again, there's a tiny little piece of it that is poisonous. But the second we realize that there's the poison there, we throw in the towel and we walk away. You walk away from something that maybe you could have changed.

SPEAKER_01 18:50

You gave up because you didn't feel like you were appreciated. Or even worse, you reject a leadership because the only thing you've known is broken leadership. And you make the mistake of deciding that the whole thing is rotten when it's really just the part of the structure that's that's around it. See, this is what we got to realize is that a broken system does not get to own the part of you that cares. It's about separating the things that we love from the things that we don't.

SPEAKER_00 19:31

So what am I on about here?

SPEAKER_01 19:34

Talking a lot about systems, and I'm talking a lot about trains and a lot of other bullshit, and I guarantee you half of you are sitting here scratching your head going, what does even mean?

SPEAKER_00 19:44

What this means is that before you make any decisions, before you quit, before you stay, before you rebuild, before you burn it down, name specifically what it is you're angry at. Because making life-altering decisions on a blanket diagnosis that's insanity. Anger is never clear. And we often confuse exhaustion with a final truth.

SPEAKER_01 20:35

And we mistake a portion of an environment for the entire environment. Pause long enough to see what's really going on, what's really happening.

SPEAKER_00 21:02

Burnout will tell you something is unsustainable. Resentment. Resentment's usually a good indicator of a real wound.

SPEAKER_01 21:14

But none of those things are going to point you really at exactly what needs to be changed. They need to be listened to, those, those, those feelings, that anger, that burnout, that resentment. You need to listen to them. You need to figure them out and resolve them. But you don't want to blindly obey. You don't want a knee-jerk reaction. The better question isn't just do I hate this?

SPEAKER_00 21:42

It's what part of this is actually killing me. A clearer target gives you a clearer choice. Maybe you stay, but you stop pretending everything's fine.

SPEAKER_01 22:01

Maybe you leave, but you don't let the environment steal the part of it that still matters to you. Maybe you rebuild the container. Maybe you recover the craft somewhere else. Maybe you grieve what got poisoned. And maybe you stop blaming yourself for reacting to something that was genuinely unhealthy.

SPEAKER_00 22:27

I'm not telling you to stay.

SPEAKER_01 22:30

I'm not telling you to leave. I'm not telling you your anger's wrong. I'm not telling you burnout is imaginary, and I'm damn sure not telling you to make peace with something that's killing you. What I'm saying is this. Before you walk away, before you stay too long, before you burn the whole thing down, make sure your anger is aimed properly. Because sometimes burnout does not mean the thing is dead. Sometimes it means the system around it has poisoned your relationship with it. And if you can't separate the thing from the environment that poisoned it, you may end up making the wrong sacrifice.

SPEAKER_00 23:07

And that thing that was killing you can come along with you.

SPEAKER_01 23:13

You may stay loyal to something that is killing you. You may walk away from something that still really deeply mattered to you because you couldn't separate it from the place that made it unbearable.

SPEAKER_00 23:27

Maybe the question isn't just do I hate this?

SPEAKER_01 23:30

Maybe the better question is, am I sure I actually know what I'm angry at?

SPEAKER_00 23:37

Because when we know what we're actually angry at, we make cleaner choices. The anger is gonna be real. Exhaustion's real. Damage is real. Poison system can make something meaningful feel dead. And if you're not careful, you may let that system decide what is still alive in you. Don't give it that much power. I think that's it for this week. Take what works, leave what doesn't. Choose and keep moving.