So you hate your job! Congratulations—you’re in good company with the roughly two-thirds of Americans who have disengaged from their jobs. But this ease of commiseration is the only thing that’s easy when you hate your job. You dread Sunday nights because the workweek is only a sleepless night away. You spend extra time in the bathroom because it’s the one place your boss can’t question why you’re away from your desk. You watch the wall clock tick-tick-tick to a 5 o’clock that never comes. Every day is a struggle. But take heart—an abysmal job can provide learning opportunities and life skills that a walk-on-air job never would.

When you endure a job you hate, you learn to:

• Know what you want in a job. Maybe you thought you’d love working in a “quiet” work environment (where no one even says hello in the morning). Maybe you thought you’d love working for a small company (where everyone knows everyone else’s business). Or maybe you thought you’d love QA testing video games (where you jump your character against a wall for three hours). In actuality, you don’t love it. But you learned what you would rather have in your ideal position—that you prefer a social work environment, that you value your personal privacy, and that you enjoy a good challenge.
• Work with people you wouldn’t be friends with. You’re not alone if you hate your job because of a micromanaging boss or a misery-inducing coworker. But you must learn to limp along, at least professionally, with people you don’t personally care for. You can be patient with your differences, and perhaps even leverage them to the company’s advantage. And at the very least, you can learn the valuable life skills of problem-solving and conflict resolution.
• Let go of the little things. You dislike your daily enough; if you start letting every little thing bother you, you’ll soon be stomping around the office like a summer Sasquatch. So let it go when Mike from Sales “borrows” your good pen for the second time this week. Let it go when Rhonda smacks her gum during your team meeting. Let it go when your pre-Obama desktop takes 20 minutes to recoup from a reset. If you hang on to everything that bothers you, you’ll only feel itchier (and angrier) to leave.
• Find the silver lining. It’s easy to blame all of life’s woes on a hated job. But the thing about life is, it’s not all baby hedgehogs, pumpkin spice lattes, and last week’s Game of Thrones. Tough stuff happens more often than we’d like. But when you stick with a loathsome job, you get good at seeing the good in it, whether it’s donuts on Fridays, the atta-boy you got last week, or bathroom paper towels that don’t feel like chipboard. Hey, maybe your coworkers are Thrones fans, too.

No one said it was fun to stick with a job you hate. But that doesn’t mean it’s not valuable! And when you’re ready to move on to a job you like, you may find you’re personally better for having endured a rough patch.