I would encourage people to be more aware of the overjustification effect.<p>I used to lecture about it often when consulting, and despite that it still reared its ugly head in my own life.<p>I used to love talking about tech. Because I loved talking about tech and was often right in what I had to say about it, I ended up getting paid a crazy amount of money to talk to senior management at very large companies about tech.<p>And after I left the industry because I didn't want to be a professional Cassandra for the rest of my life, I pretty much stopped talking about tech to my professional peers, because I was no longer being paid for it.<p>It took about a decade to realize that I'd effectively cut off my nose because I'd gotten used to profiting off my face. I missed out on what were I'm sure many conversations I'd have intrinsically enjoyed simply because I'd removed the extrinsic motivation for having them.<p>In an ideal world, the things we enjoy doing that create value wouldn't be extrinsically compensated because they wouldn't <i>need</i> to be as we'd have our needs taken care of by fair distribution of collective profit in an ever less scarcity driven world. Unfortunately it's not a perfect world and likely won't be in my lifetime, so instead I just try to be more mindful to not let extrinsic motivators too deeply into the parts of my life I care about or enjoy.<p>Work (doing a task for extrinsic reward) is toxic to intrinsically motivated passion.
I loved work before I had a girlfriend.<p>I had nothing to do, it was my strongest outlet for social connections. I was praised. I was paid well.<p>Now that I have a long-term partner that I really enjoy spending time and traveling with. It's terrible, lol. I can't imagine how I feel after a few kids.
I agree with the overall sentiment, however the main point I think is short-sighted. Work is inescapable, a requirement of life. Denying this leads to a poor quality of life at the societal level. Put simply, work is the effort to lower entropy. Cleaning is lowering the entropy of a relatively high entropy environment which is dirty and disorderly. Cooking is needed to eat, which is a way to acquire energy for our bodies to maintain their low entropy state of being alive.<p>Virtually every type of work is a way to fight high entropy and basically survive. No matter where you are or where you go, work is needed. If you live off-grid in the woods, you need to hunt and survive somehow, in which case arguably work is much harder than in the middle of civilization.<p>It is hard to find meaning from tasks that have no direct connection to this overall reduction in entropy. I see it as a trade-off. You get civilization at your fingertips i.e. food delivery, the entire knowledgebase of humanity with the Internet, amazing entertainment from movies to VR, etc. and in exchange you have to cope with being a tiny, insignificant part of the machine.
As some wag put it: "Work is something so horrible that people will pay you to do it for them."<p>Stepping off the hedonic treadmill is a choice.<p>Not being a natural born hustler is Ok.
A quote that I like to read when in moods like the author:<p>“A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and with the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome desert thereby. The man is now a man.”
– Thomas Carlyle
Yes it is tough when you hate your work. That describes me for too much of my working life. A solution is to architect an escape plan and relentless try to execute it, even if you keep failing to escape. The hardest part of the escape plan is that it often means work days go for 8 hours to 14 hours though
Well I hate work too but there's different degrees of hate for different types of work.<p>When I was a kid, on my summer vacations, my parents would send me to my grandparents in the rural countryside. I loved it there, there would be all kind of enjoyable activities to do: fishing, swimming, playing football, reading (practically no TV since there was nothing on it but two hours per day of communist propaganda).<p>But inescapable among leisure there was also work. Farm work.<p>Scything is really hard and on top of that I'd be awaken at 5 AM in the morning, force fed and sent to the fields (with my grandpa and my cousin). It's cold in the morning and the grass is wet from the dew but I guess it beats doing this in the scorching heat of the day: <a href="https://romanialibera.ro/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/747678-1624406400-o-persoana-aflata-la-cosit-a-gasit-oseminte-pe-camp-1068x711.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://romanialibera.ro/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/747678-1...</a><p>But the thing I really really hated was weed hoeing: <a href="https://nordnews.md/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/prasit-750x430.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://nordnews.md/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/prasit-750x43...</a><p>Never fucking ending rows of corn or potatoes in the scorching heat of the day with leaves touching my sweating skin and irritating it as if the heat and sweat and dust weren't enough and on top of that the monotony of it. I would try to think of something useful or entertaining but inevitably I'd fall into a torpor where my mind would just shut off and only my body would mechanically carry on automatically. And worst of all, there was no point either hurrying up nor was it possible to slack off. Slacking off meant getting scolded for not keeping the pace. Hurrying up was even worse, I'd get tired and find out the reward at the end of finishing a never ending row of plants and weed was ... another row.<p>I do not recall it but my parents remind me that at some point I let go this from my mouth and sounded like it came from the depths of my soul: "I'd rather solve 1000 problems in mathematics than hoe just another row of weeds".<p>So I guess hating work is all about references. All work is hate-able but not to the same degree.
I am still at uni but reading this really makes me questioning if I should go down this path. I think the main problem is the idea of following someone elses business plan for the rest of your life, which can be pretty demotivating.
There is of course some evidence that after a few months, lotos eating gets .. well .. <i>boring</i> And there have been posts here discussing the importance of exposing kids (young minds at least) to boredom to stimulate motivations.<p>There is also the memorial for Robert Falcon Scott: <i>To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.</i><p>OTOH yea I get this. I could devour me some crap 'tec fiction and a drink by a shady tree.
The problem is not work itself but the incessant need of working oneself to death or in other words trading off everything else just so one can earn enough to meet the basic needs. Is that the purpose of life?
I think this post comes from an honest place, but it's a really trite sentiment. And I think this idea that it puts forth that people can separate or partition themselves from their work is wishful thinking. It reminds me of that TV show Severance.<p>>The idea of a work-life balance is a myth. It suggests that work should be as central to our lives as our passions, which is wrong.<p>The author of this piece is a creative, and probably has a preoccupation with what her peers are achieving and measuring herself based on that. But I've known people who are waiters or bartenders who end up just as obsessed with their job. It's inherently going to be a part of you. It's part of your life. You can't just turn that off.<p>Something that's really interesting to me about viewing work through this lens is how disconnected the idea of "work" has become from reality. Every day millions of people wake up and perform all sorts of labor that is absolutely essential to keep societies functioning. Growing and harvesting crops, repairing electrical outages, keeping our water supply clean, picking up trash, etc...<p>Without that, things would fall apart. But most of those jobs are looked down upon and there definitely isn't a sense of community built by doing them. In any way of humans organizing themselves, labor would be necessary. The author's feelings about work remind me of Karl Marx's theory of alienation: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_alienation" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_alienation</a>
What I hate the most about work is businesses don't care about making stuff good, society better or solving problems. They just want to make money. Yet, they pretend they care. Microsoft doesn't even care about having a working search bar, no it needs to run AI and show ads instead. They're just trying to fuck everyone over to make a buck. And if you don't want to die in the street, you have to participate in similar activities. There's just no pride.