Thank you for joining us for episode 439 of Live Happy Now.

If you aren't loving your life at work, you're not alone.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and this week I'm talking with Greg Kettner, founder of the organization

Work Happy and an expert in workplace well-being.

New research shows that workers are the unhappiest they've been in years, and Greg's here to

talk with me about why we're becoming less happy on the job, what it means to our mental health,

and what we can do to make things better. Let's have a listen.

Hey, Greg, thanks for coming back.

Hey, Paula, thanks for having me. It's good to see you. It's been a couple months, but yeah, life is good. It's always good to see your face. That's so awesome. Well, so new study is out, and the first thing I thought, okay, two things popped in my mind when I read it first. I was like, man, that's really sad. And the other one was like, I need to talk to Greg about this. So as you know, that's what I did. I reached out. And I wanted

to talk to you because this study, it's telling us that workers are the unhappiest that they've been

in three years. And then when you trace that back, and it's like three years ago, we were in a

pandemic. And we were all pretty miserable. So we say we're less happy than we were then. That's a sad state of things. And I guess for starters, before we talk about the why, does that kind of line up with what you're seeing in the work that you do? Yeah. I think we all went in and hunkered down and it was brand new,

right? Nobody knew what to do or we're working from home. How do we work from home? Right?

I mean, remember Skype? I mean, who had Skype anyway? What?

And now Zoom is a verb, right? Mm-hmm. That's it. And so now we've learned how to go through it.

But now people are struggling with, you know, I have to bring my employees back to the office or employees.

I don't want to go back.

I enjoy working on my pajamas and getting my work done, you know.

So it is.

I'm finding the same thing that people are just like, I want to do meaningful and purposeful work and, you know, do something that's going to mean something, not just a paycheck anymore.

So do you think that's a big part of what's driving this dissatisfaction? Because I noticed in the study they talked about it's not like the ups and downs that we used to have with, or it's like, I'm really mad at my boss. It's just a complete apathy and disinterest.

Yeah. I think also two people have, you know, kind of had more time. And even me personally, right,

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