>I find it really challenging to talk with people who have completely separated their work from their emotional being. For me, work is part of life and it should be a meaningful one.
I like my work too 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. Most jobs are things no one would want to do if they didn't need to survive, and that's fundamentally built into our society and economic system. Let them eat cake though.
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.
Ironically emptying the bins and picking fruits might be more directly meaningful for people then building the new generation ad platform/social media/saas tool.
Picking fruit would have been incredibly meaningful if you had spent the year doing the variety of agricultural activities leading up to it. There’s a reason so many cultures had harvest festivals. But now rather than a whole area getting together to literally pick the fruits of their year-long labour and celebrate we’ve optimised the process by just bringing in some seasonal workers.
I think GP means that picking fruit has a direct, meaningful impact on consumers--fresh food--whereas the positive impact of the next saas thing is indirect and often dubious.
But yeah, harvesting as a community sounds more meaningful to workers than mass fruit production does.
Haha, yeah. I have a side story about working in construction with my dad. He was a home builder and was helping to build out a line of new apartments. It was very straightforward work -- he did the tile in the kitchen and bathrooms. I was his helper. He was excellent at it. All the buzzwords inclusive of efficiency and quality. It was fulfilling work to me and I had a sense of pride working alongside my dad. I made $10/hour, $80 a day.
Now I work in FinTech. The fulfillment is different, sometimes it's good. But I reflect on this time often. I own a small home now and my dad comes around to help me fix or remodel stuff. I'm handier now because of those experiences -- I think I do find a little more fulfillment when working with my hands. I also find myself in my garden more often which brings a little more joy than my day job. Perhaps it's just balance.
Those traditions and rituals are alive and well in small communities. Modern agriculture is based on the need to feed millions and millions of people. That’s why it is the way it is.
Some of my friends from Poland went to Western/Northern Europe to pick tomatoes, salad, cherries etc. None of them ever spoke about meaning of the job, only that it was long, hard, uncomfortable hours in sun, rain etc. and that it paid good money.
100%, I was thinking this exact same thing. I couldn't help but ponder the irony that during the pandemic, the vast majority of "essential workers", i.e. people we really need to fulfill the foundational layer of the economy, were usually the lowest paid: garbage men, farm labor, construction labor, grocery store workers, delivery drivers, etc. The famous "Pyramid of Capitalist System", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_of_Capitalist_System, had never felt more spot on to me.
Meanwhile, I'm relatively very highly paid, and while I really like my job because I get to work with interesting technology and I think my coworkers are fantastic, the only reason my job exists at all is because of the extreme insanity of the US healthcare system. Literally everyone would be better off if there wasn't a reason for my job to exist in the first place.
We make sure that all important jobs are easy to do so that they can reliably get done. Hard unreliable jobs can thus never be as important as the easy ones, they are still important but never as important because we don't want to rely on unreliable work.
You can see that in software orgs as well, the easiest tasks are also the most important, like ensuring the site continues to run and handling breaking changes in dependencies, those tasks has to be done or your entire product is gone. But the highest paid engineers probably don't work on those things, instead they might look at adding more features or drafting new architecture, those tasks aren't as important but they are much harder to do so are better paid in general and you require higher skilled workers.
So in general the lower paid the more important their work is, because higher skilled tasks are harder and less reliably done so we try to not rely on them getting done. Think famous painter vs low paid icon designer, which work is more important? Goes for most things.
Thanks very much. I've heard this phrased different ways before and I understand it, but "We make sure that all important jobs are easy to do so that they can reliably get done" is probably the clearest and most succinct way I've heard this put.
I worked as a garbage man to pay for the start of my software ventures. It was the best combination thinkable of sitting in a room on a chair behind a computer, being in the software clouds, typing away, and being outside, working out, having fun and getting enough sunlight.
These both completely different things balanced each other out perfectly.
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.
This is what motivated me to start a company. It is a tech company because that's what I know. But at the end of the day, it's my way of creating what I consider a healthy environment. I was very fortunate to work in an environment like that 6-7 years ago and now I want to re-create it through my company.
Maybe compared to ones that don’t toss mid and late career professionals out like a bag of moldy peaches when some confluence of economical and technological factors makes them inconvenient, no matter if they’ve got kids, or a cancer diagnosis, are supporting lots of relatives, or anything else like that, and then say it’s their fault for not predicting it. Maybe ones that don’t financially ruin people because the hospital they got driven to while unconscious doesn’t take their insurance? That is, if they have it because the insurance that costs more than local mortgages for many? Maybe the places that sentence someone involved in a bank heist orders of magnitude longer sentences than white collar criminals that stole orders of magnitude more money?
If you really don't know, I'm not your research assistant so I won't go look up things like universal health care and the social support strategies of various European countries for you. If you're just trying to bait me into some sort of pedantic argument, I'm far past the age where I felt compelled to interact with people who think being deliberately obtuse is a valid conversation tactic. Either way, I'm going to let you finish this one yourself. Have a fantastic sunday.
Many European countries have high youth unemployment and low innovation along with a typically lower standard of living than in the United States. It’s important to be aware of the downsides of leftist economic policies.
Compared to one that pays well and treats people humanely.
It's not like that in order to suggest that something is bad there must be an existing better version. The suggestion can be about creating that better version.
That of course is a general answer to your asking for a comparison, as if lack of one would refute the point.
Some country first abolished child labour, even when all others still had it. Where the people who advocated for that misguided, since they didn't have a better example to "compare" to?
These are of course also concrete answers to your question, like many EU countries where the vacation period is one month, where there are better employee protections, where there is less discrimination, where overtime is frowned upon and the work culture is not the US "grind", where waiters don't have to make do on tipping, and so on.
They don't have to be perfect in everything either (because an easy knee jerk critique would immediately point to some other shortcomings in their work arrangements). For the point of the suggestion, it's enough that they have better aspects than some country like the US could also adopt.
I think we're at a point in the history of Western civilization where we should strive to guarantee non-painful survival for all our citizens. This doesn't necessarily mean comfort, but nobody who grew up legally in the United States should have to wonder about finding nutritious food; clean water; and a quiet, warm, and secure place to sleep. I only restrict this tentatively to citizens because I think these programs would fare better politically if limited to citizens.
People of all backgrounds will find that non-painful survival is still profoundly unfulfilling and will continue to innovate, create, work. I think the fear of succumbing to the elements in America is too real and that that fear is a massive drain on the economy and the spirit of our people.
I totally agree and I don't understand why everyone isn't on board with this vision. Sometimes I look around and think "this can't be the end of the story, there has to be a better way to run society".
What's interesting are the libertarian types who want the opposite. You don't get anything by default, you have to fight for everything. All I can think of is 1) why? and 2) is that really their vision of the future? Like in 100 years we'll still have to work meaningless jobs just to put food on our table? Is that really the future we want?
They want that future because they ultimately believe in human hierarchies.
Sometimes those hierarchies are natural and essential (race, gender, age, whatever), sometimes they're contingent and constructed (skillset, grindset, 'hard work', whatever), but it always has the same end result: they think that you can categorise people like insects, and that some groups of people deserve better things than others. Naturally they believe they would not be at the bottom of the hierarchy.
You may also be interested in the term 'capitalist realism'.
Hah, I'm right there with you. I'm definitely aware of capitalist realism, and what you said about hierarchies is exactly why I claim libertarians are right wing.
> This doesn't necessarily mean comfort, but nobody who grew up legally in the United States should have to wonder about finding nutritious food; clean water; and a quiet, warm, and secure place to sleep.
Western civilization has brought more food, clean water, and rescued more people from poverty in the 20th century than the entire history of human civilization. None of that was done by offering guarantees, it was achieved through free market capitalism. Competing economic systems that offered the guarantees you’re describing not only slaughtered millions and caused mass starvation but collapsed from economic dysfunction.
I agree with both statements you've made, however I don't see why offering food and housing security would necessitate mass murder, if we were to try it from a less ideological fervent posture. It wouldn't be described as a proletariat revolution or seizing the means of anything. It would just be another social program that I hope would be administered efficiently and ambitiously, and which would replace some of the other legacy programs we've built. I'd hope we'd test it at a small scale and then go from there. The scope of the communism you're identifying in my suggestion would be limited.
I'm generally a supporter of capitalism, but I think present conditions could be improved to facilitate that competition. Workers need to be able to use public transit in peace, which means getting homeless people out. We need to be able to offer shelter so that forceful removal is justifiable. Children need unequivocal access to nutrition so that malnourishment doesn't impair their ability to compete in the arena of idea-generation and in the knowledge economy. I think if the government were in the business of offering floors on quality of life that people could spend their time more productively instead of solving the same hunter-gatherer types of problems individually over and over again. Food insecurity may have been the impetus for work in the past, but I believe that status insecurity can replace it going forward. Nobody needs to starve for the West to prosper.
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
I grew up in pretty severe poverty, the adults around me didn’t work glamorous jobs but they all took pride in doing a good job. Even sanitation jobs, which were pretty common in the family. They would actually say something pretty similar to what the guy wrote - that if you’re going to spend so many hours of your life doing it, it’s taking pride in a job well done, the relationships you have with your colleagues and customers you get to know, and things like that that you connect with emotionally. Spending 50 years doing a job where you try to dissociate emotionally as best you can sounds something like a nightmare, and what would a person who behaves like that be like to work with?
Well, tech is a bit different in that because it uses a computer (and a lot of roles aren't highly monitored, if at all i.e. WFH) you have the choice to do things other than your job.
I imagine most people working with a computer in a corporate role, are spending maybe a few hours of their time actually working, and the rest of their time doing things they actually enjoy doing.
> Which jobs are you considering no one would want to do?
Not OP but most low-skill, sanitation-related jobs are most likely the best example. There certainly is craftsmanship behind cleaning but it mostly boils down to hard physical labor.
The Spotify part though, isn't part of cleaning, if that makes sense? It happened that she has found an enjoyable aspect to the tasks due to its nature, but not that she specifically searched for that job because it lets her listen to Spotify.
I can confirm this, I know a cleaner like that as well. Additionally the work is not that physically taxing for the most part and there is no struggle involved like in many problem solving jobs. It‘s often poorly paid but that depends a lot on the country.
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.
> 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).
Btw this is simply not true. People worked less in agriculture than a 9-5. You’d only really be working hard at specific times of the year- harvesting, seeding, etc. You’d be doing other things like working on the house, feeding various animals, churning butter or making clothes, etc, in the in-between.
Well I am not sure you're even disagreeing with what I actually said: I didn't say they did the same thing every day. Just that they had to work hard day in day out. And I am pretty sure that's the case, even if what they did a lot of the time is what you call the "in-betweens". Remember that most people would've lived under a local chief which surely would find lots and lots of things for them to do, like build monuments, train for war (which is a constant in every human society ever - ours may be the most peaceful society in all of human history actually), even compete in sports which could be a matter of life and death in those times. Women had to be really hard workers in those times as I'm sure taking care of kids/cooking/cleaning before electricity was discovered would've required much more time than they actually had.
If we expand working in agriculture to mean everything humans do in addition to working in agriculture, then sure you might be on to something, but then we are sort of drifting away from the topic of what people do for work and whether it is rewarding. I think people are mainly disagreeing with the specific agricultural work part.
> As soon as i read this a beautiful and peaceful life flashed before my eyes.
I lived such a life on my grandparents subsistence farm in early post-communist Romania, where we only bought store made bread and nothing else for months (and even that was optional, but store made bread tasted better than homemade).
I would LOVE to go back in time to that house on a summer night, 0 light pollution, starry night, just the crickets and occasional sound of the hooves of the cows or horse against the stone pavement in their yard when they went for a drink, or the dog being happy you visit him outside when you take a piss.
Or the late evening dinner on the high porch, people across the stone-wall fence returning from the fields in their horse pulled carriages overburdened with hay.
Or the strong sense of community of the people gathered at their out of the gate benches smaltalking in the evening.
Or the rain-invocation rituals that involved splashing the village virgins dressed only in leaves in their late evening procession.
Or the taste of milk straight after being milked out of the cow (I don't know how I never got sick), or the taste of fresh butter, or cheese or whey cheese.
Or fetching sheep milk from the herd manager over the bouncy wire bridge, starry night, accompanied by swarms of fireflies, wind whispering through the alder leaves.
Or the cows opening the iron gate with a thud in the evening when they return with the communal herd.
Or riding the horse without a saddle because my shoeless feet hurt from walking over freshly scythed grasslands.
Or returning with my grandpa late in the night from a long trip up the mountain to his lonely uncle's house. We brought him meaty treats and he showed us the squirrels in his roof attic.
Or to hear my grandparents extraordinary survival stories or stories about supranatural occurences.
That’s actually sort of a myth. If you work on a farm, there are a few very intense parts of the year, but most days are otherwise prep work and maintenance and you can actually wrap up fairly early and manage your own schedule. What sucks about farming is thin margins and how a bad crop can wipe you out.
Possibly different on a factory farm that maximises production every day but that’s not really what you’re referring to.
This comes from personal experience working on productive small farms.
A modern farm has almost nothing in common with the farms of pre-modern history. It would've been much closer to indigenous tribes for much of history.
There was stuff to do outside the growing season still. There were farm animals to tend to, you fixed up your house and the farm buildings, made and mended clothes etc. Although, since the days were shorter, the work time was naturally shorter as well, as artificial light was expensive.
I guess you could always get into a situation where you manage a farm that exhausts all your available time.
But work is indeed seasonal, and I doubt you'd actually be able to be so effective that you don't have any free time at all. (And if you manage that, presumably you'll be a rather rich farmer...)
Also, in many places, there's nothing much to do in the winter except stay inside the house around a warm fire and try not to freeze. Yes you could take on some other work using the light from the fireplace as well... but did everyone actually exert themselves so much that they didn't have a single day of rest? I really doubt it and it's more likely it's a tale told by capitalists to scare us into being grateful for being employed.
PS: much of Europe also observed the Sabbath too, so there's also at least one day off per week.
This is bullshit. I directly know families in Asia that farm a moderate sized one acre plot without heavy machinery. It is long days of work during planting and harvest but that’s less than 2 months of the year. The rest of the year is maintenance and other support work and starting at 6 in the morning they’re usually done by 1-2p.
It's not bullshit. I am not talking about modern farm life, I am talking about the time before civilization rose (which is nearly all of human history before 10,000BC to around 400,000 years earlier when people would've been recognized as a modern human).
Do those families have access to modern conveniences at all? Like any goods shipped across the world by modern shipping, just as one of thousands of examples? They do, I am sure. Imagine you lived before that, where the only stuff you would have easy access to were goods produced within a few hundred Km (but mostly you needed to produce everything yourself within your "tribes").
Most of human history had no cities, very few roads, very little commerce outside local villages. I am sure they did have a lot of free time as others mentioned... but work was just not something you did for enjoyment and I think it never really is.
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.
And most tech workers are doing classic "bullshit jobs" aka "dumb shit that doesn't matter". Too many of the others are doing work that is a net negative to the world. I'd be more passionate about collecting garbage bins than making kids depressed.
My blue collar friends aren't passionate about their jobs at all - it's long hours, physically unhealthy, and bad conditions/pay. But at least what they do is real and meaningful without having to craft a weird narrative for themselves about how passionate their life is making better buttons and faster queries.
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.
Despite the passion they pour into their work, they understand that once it's out there in the world, it's not theirs anymore. The moment the artist lets go of it, it belongs to the viewer, who will interpret it differently through the lens of all their personal experience. And if the thing is any good, it will be heavily analyzed and critiqued, so to stay sane the artist has to completely let go of it and focus their energy on their next creation.
I was lucky to have learned this lesson from day one. My Atari 400 had no storage since it was beyond my budget and I wanted to save for the diskette drive rather than cassette. So I'd spend days making and playing with a single program creation, never turning it off. Eventually I'd want to do something else so click, playing Asteroids, and repeat.
Same here. And when you make a point of it in conversation you’re considered the crazy one. Let alone mention it to coworkers, you’re instantly a kissass.
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.
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".
Guess we could think of the Giza Pyramids as a counter-example. Plenty
of religious monuments got built on the bones of slaves.
But I wonder, factoring out the physical toil, whether future generations
might look at giant technological monoliths, maybe The Internet of 2100
and say;
"Those techies were unhappy slaves. they laboured in basements and
cubicles. They wrote code just to eat! It was obscenely inhuman."
Or maybe historians might pore through HN archives and say;
"Those who believed in the Great Singularity", devoted their lives
out of religious fervour. Many of them wrote code without being
paid, just because they had a vision. "
Or maybe there will be no trace of us. Anyway, history can tell us
facts about what happened, but maybe isn't so good at telling us what
went on the minds and dreams of people past.
> Guess we could think of the Giza Pyramids as a counter-example. Plenty of religious monuments got built on the bones of slaves.
im not arguing it they died during construction. My point is that a lot of them were undoubtedly proud of the work they produced, not even all the workers on the pyramids were slaves so thats pretty telling imo. Also i am one of those "techies" and i have been involved in projects i didnt initially have passion for, and in all cases i ended up coming around because it was something i worked on daily. Thats what im saying happened with the workers in churches/pyramids, surely some of them.
Is this saying that slavery is justified as long as the goal is something "monumental"? As long as some slaves are "proud" of the work they're being _forced_ to do _on penalty of death_ then we can at least rest assured that their pride in humanity was boosted at the amazing spectacle of a giant pile of rocks built on behalf of an oppressor. Oof.
> What would be a fix for capitalism that cripples our attitude to work?
Us. Our culture.
FWIW I'll try to explain a little more. I mean, that's a great
question but I think it's the wrong question, if you don't mind me
saying that.
Nobody can see outside the logic of their own epoch.
Capitalism can't be "fixed", because it's just what it is. If we
"fixed" it, it wouldn't be capitalism any more, it would be something
else. In fact it's been many different things over the past centuries
as it transforms, much as people like Smith and Marx predicted.
Most people at this point say "Okay, smarty.. so what will you replace
it with?". And again, wrong question. There is no list of "systems"
that could simply be plugged in as replacements. That kind of nonsense
leads to great leaps into famine and 20 million starving. Politics is
not software like that. At best it's a set of potential slow paths
that all start at where we are now. It is not even a set of
destinations, because every end point we pursue changes with the
dynamics of time and change itself.
The question, as I see it, is what do we change in ourselves to make
capitalism work. What makes capitalism into a non-toxic system that
does not destroy our planet and lead us to perpetual cycles of war,
and misery and self-hatred?
Now if you want to talk about that list... that's another
conversation.
I find quite problematic when capitalism is driven by fiat money. Because then there is no limit, until something terrible wrong happens. Or... Someone brings a better financial system.
> Firstly, let’s make clear that it’s unlikely that you’re good at something you don’t love. If you managed to do that, you’ve probably dedicated the hours to something that does not fulfill you. The goal is not happiness. It’s about fulfillment. After all, you have to do what you love. You are that, how can you be doing anything else?
The author is not considering loving meta-skills. I don't love programming, I do love intellectual challenge. I also love learning things as fast as possible.
If I'd be a cleaner as a job, I'd teach myself how to be mindful while doing it. I'd teach myself how to be okay with the boring/mundane and utilize the job as a tech detox. If I'd be a bus driver, I'd utilize the job as a way to make my social skills better (I've seen bus drivers do that in NL) or I'd utilize the job as a way to reflect on life as I wouldn't need all the brain space for driving the bus. If I'd be a blue collar worker, I'd flip homes since my network would allow for it. I'd also do a lot of crafting on my own.
When one loves a meta-skill, many things become their passion.
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.
> If you don’t know what you love, try playing with a couple of things.
I have a theory that what you love is what you can experience bad versions of. If you're picky about something, you don't really like it. Connoisseurs and fanatics aren't picky, they're voracious.
If you can only drink the very best wines, you don't like wine. I can eat very very bad, even stinky Chinese food, because I love all versions of it.
I can tolerate bad books much more than bad movies. I can't stand a bad movie, it makes me upset and impatient: I don't really like movies. People who do, watch everything they can, the good and the bad alike. Etc.
If you truly don't know what you love, see if you can get interested in bad instances of things; if you like something when it's bad, you'll love the good version of it.
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”
I bet someone deep into interior design could hold some really firm opinions on prison cell decor. Presumably they wouldn't think prison cells are the pinnacle of interior design, but it's not like there's no design there at all.
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]).
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.
I'm not saying to love something is to be devoid of taste or incapable of sorting the bad from the good. I'm saying it means being able to suffer the bad, to sit through a bad movie until the end, in the hunt for any passable scene.
> 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?
Sorry if this came out as insensitive. I've never been to China. By Chinese food I mean food that is available in Chinese restaurants in Europe where I live. By bad Chinese food I mean food that isn't fresh, that's dry, that has obviously been reheated more than once. I don't mean rotten exactly (although it can happen).
I love programming and computer science and everything around it. I love learning about it in my free time and creating programs that serve no other purpose than entertainment (for myself).
I couldn’t care less about the e-commerce software my boss pays me to maintain/fix/add features. I do it because it pays the bills. God, I hate daily stand ups.
Well. The paragraph below really comes at a good time,
>> Emotion cannot be separate from work. It has to be a part of it. When working, you’re expressing yourself. You express beliefs, opinions, and strategies, world views. You cannot detach yourself completely from work. I doubt that you ever should.
because 2 days ago I had a discussion with the owner of the company I work for (and, therefore, my boss), where I told him that we are going through a bizarre moment and that one of our colleagues was in pieces when talking to me.
He asked if that affected me, and I said that obviously it does, it's a person suffering, a person I like and who delivers a lot of value to the company.
He replied saying: "Well, it shouldn't, only our family should affect us in that aspect."
Then, finally, I understood what these people really think. They use us just to achieve their goals, the whole idea of team/squad is, in the end, a big fallacy.
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.
I used to be the same. Until I started a family. You suddenly realise how… unimportant coding is when you have people who depend on you and you them. I’m a different developer now than I was back then, but I think better for it.
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.
Let’s not pass judgement on what other people love or not. You simply have no idea.
There are many things I love but since I got a family I just don’t have time for them. Or if I have the time I realize there’s a million other things I can be doing with my family.
You have cars and coding. You spend time on those hobbies and presumably not with your family. OP just realized he’d rather spend it with his family.
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.
Id also be interested, I see learning computer skills as a way to eventually make my families life better by creating solutions for things around the house. Have you reoriented your efforts to something similar?
You are what you love, but until you don't have a family (specially kids) you don
t know what love is, and its definitely not work. So I am what I love, but I'm not my work neither my job. You neither. So don't judge people based by what they demonstrate at work. Most majority of people are there for the money.
Fun fact that I became a much better developer when I started to think like that. I dont slack around. I work 10 hours day, happy and concentrated. I see the results of my work impacting my personal life in a positive way. And the problems that I have at work, are not my problem, but companies problem. I am there to solve them, but after day is over, I just keep them at work.
It's a powerplay imo. You can show your emotions if you are in the power. I've found repeatedly getting penalized for being emotional at work.
That's one of the reasons I want to move out of a job.
I get why someone would believe this, but it's so disconnected from reality for the majority of people. It comes from a place where you haven't been concerned about needing to live. About feeding yourself or your family, having stability, getting out of debt.
I'm lucky enough to be doing what I love, but I got here by being good enough at doing what I don't love.
I freelance over 9 years on field that was my hobby and love. While I still love my work, I wouldn't say its a hobby anymore. Passion is gone, now I improve my skills with everyday working in field of mine previously a passionate hobby.
I consider hobby as unconditional needs for creativity, while job is condition for make a living.
Most people don't love anything particularly strongly IMO. They have interests and they exhaust them over time (sometimes, over a long time, if they're too busy to spend too much time on an interest). People who actually love something, i.e. spend a lot of time on it over decades, are rare.
> I find it really challenging to talk with people who have completely separated their work from their emotional being.
Is this not everyone? Who the fuck brings their emotions to work? I thought the whole trope of "you should love what you do" was just capitalist tripe to get people excited about the work most people were required to do to avoid homelessness (notice—society offers no right to shelter or any other meaningful protection from harm).
Some of us didn't choose the right parents when we were born, and don't have a nice cushy trust fund to fall back on when doing what we love doesn't pan out in compensation. Some of us have to take webshit jobs -- or worse -- to keep food and a roof. Or we could starve, which I'm sure would suit libertarian techbros just fine.
I like my work too 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. Most jobs are things no one would want to do if they didn't need to survive, and that's fundamentally built into our society and economic system. Let them eat cake though.