Is work supposed to make you happy?
Aristotle
No — and expecting it to is a modern demand that would have puzzled him.
Aristotle's word is , usually translated as happiness but closer to flourishing: a whole life going well, judged across its length rather than sampled on a Tuesday. It is an activity, not a mood. You are not supposed to be able to check whether you have it right now.
On his account work is not a component of that life so much as a condition for it. It buys the time in which the things that actually constitute a good life happen — friendship, citizenship, understanding something for its own sake. Making a living was the precondition, not the content.
We have inverted this, and the inversion is recent. Work is now expected to supply identity, community, purpose and self-expression, on top of money. That is an enormous amount of weight to hang on an arrangement whose other party can end it by email.
The diagnosis that follows is uncomfortable but freeing: some of your misery may be the sound of a demand failing rather than a job failing. The job might be fine. It is being asked to be a life.
Which raises the obvious question — if not there, then where?