You are what you love (opens in new tab)

Aye, you put your finger on something there. Reminds me of how common it is for menial jobs to be outsourced to immigrants or seasonal labour. Fruit picking in the UK to Eastern Europeans, agricultural work in Israel to Thais, etc.

Someone has to empty the bins. I guess like anything emptying bins is a job you can enjoy more or less, depending on your inner attitude to doing it, and your ability to "make the best of it" (by having a laugh with mates on the job etc.) but surely it's hard to be creative in it.

There are millions of jobs like that that have to be done by someone – unless everyone, including those who enjoy that self-fulfilment in their work, somehow were to chip in and do their bit.

As an empathetic person, this really makes me feel that we should fight for an economic system that gives people more leisure. Rewarding life doesn't need to be expensive, but it does require us to have the time to do something that we love. This is also why I dream about financial independence. I'm not lazy, I just want to do something else than what I have to.

Agree, people whose job intersects their passions are very lucky but they are in the minority. Most people look at their jobs for what they are: a source of income that allows you to buy food and have a roof over your head.

Nonetheless I believe emotional drive is needed for some high skilled jobs. It doesn’t necessarily need to be passion though. It could be desperation, greedy, peer pressure - whatever keeps you going

On the other hand, sometimes it’s also refreshing to just hear about what makes someone happy and appreciate it on its own merits without assessing its validity against others who have it worse in various ways. There’s a time and a place for both, I think.

My thoughts exactly. Does the convenience store clerk have to love her job? The garbage person? The bus boy, dishwasher, or line cook? The assembly line worker?

There are aspects of all of our jobs that we all love and hate to varying degrees, but there is nothing weird or wrong about taking a job just because you need the money.

100% agree. For me the cringe is that this belief is often used to justify ridiculous work place demands. What, you don’t want to work 60 plus hours a week for another month?

You are not defined by how “useful” you are to your job.

Which jobs are you considering no one would want to do?

I've worked labor in flooring, it's definitely not a job one wouldn't want to do without pay, but there was still an element of craftsmanship which one could find joy in

Before the modern age, most humans worked in agriculture. Really, really hard work, day in day out, no vacations, no sick days, you had to be there no matter the weather (except extreme events where your live would be endangered too much, probably). It's amazing how today we can actually even think that "work should be a meaningful part of life" rather than just a means to keep you alive. Today, I would say most people still do either menial jobs or "pointless" jobs that they have very little emotional attachment to. They do it because they must do something to survive. But there's also the higher ups who don't really love at all what they're doing, but feel like they need to keep "going up", from engineer to "lead" to C-level to CEO to founder etc. I don't think anyone really loves doing those things (except extremely narcissists who feel pleasure being in charge), they do it because they know that they have the potential to do it and they feel social pressure to climb the ladder. If we lived in a completely equal society where CEOs were not seen as "higher" than individual contributors, and consequently didn't receive ridiculously larger paychecks, who in their right mind would choose to do that? Even though I do enjoy my job, I am pretty sure that's in large part because I managed, like most other well functioning adults, to rationalize my situation so that I don't feel like working day in day out on my desk it not a stupidly pointless way to spend life - and pretend like I wouldn't much rather be surfing in the Pacific islands, working as a bartender at night, sharing stories by a fire on the beach until sunrise, living the simple life without responsibilities.

Does being able to do what you love, or being passionate about your work, come from a place of privilege? I'm not convinced. I know people who envy me at times, and often I think, why don't or didn't they follow a similar path? I think loving what you do comes mostly after feeling fulfilled from doing serious studying, a lot of working and quite some discipline. This love does not appear by itself. Just as in relationships, it takes continuous investment.

In less well paying jobs it is usually easier to have emotional integration. Less of your identity is at stake, your responsibility is small enough that you don’t have to reorganize your values to work the job.

This is my experience working in factories vs offices anyway. No one is fake in the factory because we don’t need to be. Office people play so many little games and politic around and pretend to be happy even when they’re not.

Their only reference point is other tech workers. Maybe they should get out of their social bubble and make some blue collar friends to figure this out.

It's also a recipe for a bad work environment. It's good to have passion and accountability in doing good work. It becomes a problem when you identify with your creations, then anything said about it can only be taken personally without an ability to detach from it and speak/think objectively.

> but when I hear things like this it's so hard not to cringe because of how much of a place of privilege this comes from.

Man, you must hate your family. I can tell because you think someone else who values their job highly is privileged.

Maybe we can stop using that fucking word for everything.

so many people argue the opposite, to me I often am what I do, which is an issue since most people want to get away from the tasks as soon as possible

there's also the problem of ending exploited since you will accept doing more for less

I get your point here, but here's mine.

When push comes to shove, a bit more pay won't motivate someone as much as having a feeling about the work will.

I feel guilty because I have a passion for software development but once pushed it away because I felt it was causing me social ostracization I couldn't afford (this was long before the Web exploded and "legitimized" the software developer). While doing things that were not-software, I kept getting dropped "hints" that I was on the wrong path (there is no rational way to explain this unfortunately), so I decided to hop back in (conveniently, right when the Web was starting to take off). I've been there ever since.

My S.O. is artistic but found no way to monetize that so she now does what amounts to "admin and logistical planning work for highly-paid traders", and she hates it. She complains about it all the time, especially after every business day, and she brings much stress into our relationship as a result. I spent a while trying to encourage her to push back into creative work but it just wasn't sticking- turns out that she had an evil woman manager once who kept completely shooting down her work and I think she resolved then to never let her feelings get near work ever again. My attitude towards that situation, was I in those shoes (having grown up ostracized for what I believed in and cared about, and then later vindicated) would have been to tell that woman to EABOD and I would have tried creative work elsewhere.

I have to wonder how many people out there are just going through the motions at their jobs because of something like this. And you're absolutely right- I AM privileged... but if it was possible for this to be more common, I wouldn't be. I really wish that something like my experience would happen to everyone. Would something like UBI enable more people to find "their life's work" before they get stuck in a rut that just happens to pay the bills, I wonder? How much potential economic growth are we actually missing out on, here?

You know how when you shake a bunch of different shapes on a sieve with similarly-shaped holes, you get more falling through the sieve (i.e. finding their happier job)? And when you stop shaking, whatever shape happens to be over whatever hole is the one they rest in? What do we need to do to add more "shakeability" to the market so that more people can try more things relatively safely (financially)?

My life DOES have a lot of other drawbacks that I won't get into (which probably serve to level the overall privilege I'm experiencing), but this is not one of them.

I really do wish it on everyone.

Isn't fixating on "privilege" a way of avoiding more troubling thoughts far beyond guilt? As if God made some people rich and some poor, and that's the way the world is. Let's all say a prayer for them?

The Protestant work ethic once contained many good things like a sense of duty, efficiency, self-discipline and so on. Emancipation of others, and helping others out of poverty was always built into that!

But under late stage capitalism it becomes disfigured and twisted.

That guilt is used against us. We make "work" into something that must be miserable by definition. And some of us even revel in that self-flagellation. We stop distinguishing between laborious chores and work as art and living. "Money and survival" eclipse all else. The abject penury of that mind-set is a sort of work in itself.

It need not be. Ten thousand years of artisan labour, craftsmanship, labours of love building cathedrals and monuments, cooking delicious meals... Half of all the work done in the world is childcare and caring for the old.

It's the power relations of capitalism that make work shitty, and we all know it. There's nothing "fundamental" about it. We are at a very unique and hopefully short moment in history where modern employers will go out of their way to fit suffering, humiliation and self-loathing into the job-description, maybe in order to feel justified for what they pay - often cynically hiding behind false notions of efficiency and necessity, security or whatever.

Some of the most miserable and fucked-up people I've ever met work in banking, advertising. and other places of "privilege".

That's a great way to think about it, love the meta skill concept.

I had the same realisation but never expressed it as well. I used to want to be an artist for my living. Eveventually I realised that what I really wanted was to be creative in some way. Didn't have to be art or music to earn money.

That's an interesting take!

Not really. Having taste doesn’t mean you don’t like it. You can really like subsets of things that suit your taste. “You don’t like interior design unless you get lit by prison cell decor”

Definitely "love" in its casual usage, is very fickle. You can turn something you love into something you hate by over-doing it.

Maybe the best way to kill something you love is to make it into work in the first place. There's a good argument for keeping the things you really savour a little at arms-length.

One psychological idea I found immensely helpful but hard to digest is the relation between love and hate; Love and hate are not opposites, but proximate. Love can easily flip to hate and vice versa. They're from a vector of two circuits, arousal and pleasure/displeasure. The opposite of love (and hate) is indifference. Socially, we worry about "hate speech" when a much more dangerous state of mind is blank faced indifference. ( Most of what I'm saying is just Erich Fromm [0]).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Loving

I would qualify this. If you like movies, you like all sorts of movies. You can enjoy well-done schlock horror as much as experimental Thai drama. But you still have a sense of good and bad, and you don't want to sit through something done badly in terms of what it's trying to achieve. Same with food: if you like Chinese food you maybe like all sorts of tastes, and high-end to low-end, but you don't need to like it when it's bad. Someone who likes all movies or Chinese food that they encounter doesn't actually like that thing - they just don't care enough about it.

Makes no sense to me. It seems totally possible to me to love movies without enjoying wasting 2h watching a poorly made film.

> I can eat very very bad, even stinky Chinese food

Hi, I’m a Chinese person. WTF do you mean by this? Are you seriously saying you love Chinese food (also what do you mean, Chinese food? What provinces? What regions?) when it’s shit? You’ll happily eat stale bao, rotten meat dumplings, moldy rice? What is “stinky”: durian? Something else?

Your boss sounds like they have an extremely rigid view of what emotions are and aren't "correct" in any given setting. Sounds controlling, and lacking a fundamental understanding of reality, people, and basic empathy.

I don't think all bosses are like this, but the ones who express these views in critical junctures that reveal their character and world views as such, I think it's safe to say that they indeed are intellectually and developmentally blunted (of the emotional intelligence, interpersonal relationship, and leadership dynamics variety) in a manner that can cause legitimate harm to anyone under their authority and has to take orders from them.

Enjoying your work does not means rooting for your employer. You can establish meaningful relationships with your coworkers, especially if you’re spending 8 hours together.

> Until I started a family.

I'm 51 and I've got a family too (9 years old kid) and my love for coding and tinkering with computers never went away. For example yesterday evening when they were asleep I spent hours playing with a (used) NUC I just bought. I did hack on some scripts too.

My hobbies are my cars and computing and I love that, since forever. And I still love these even though I've got a family.

I'd argue that something that you love and that you suddenly don't love anymore once you have kids is something you didn't really love that much.

A family and a love for the craft are definitely not mutually exclusive things.

I've never found the job to be all that important; especially once I saw how quickly my work was discarded for some new, fashionably different way of doing things. Honestly it's scary to imagine that some child's health insurance would depend on me staying on the treadmill of ever-changing tech nonsense. I doubt my ability to keep pace for a couple decades.

I'd say that applies across the board. For most, that kid is more important than anything else.

How are you better for it?

I just really don’t need kids or my job to find something I love.

Family converts men into money printers.

I call your payroll software and raise you working on device drivers for Nokia’s Symbian OS phones.