>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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
> 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.
Readit News
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.
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.
These both completely different things balanced each other out perfectly.
We don't even have an economic system that pays well or treats people humanely...
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.
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
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.
You are not defined by how “useful” you are to your job.
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
In a way, that kind of enjoyment is actually more important than extrinsic rewards – it actually is your moment-to-moment life.
Which, to be fair, is what Spanos' piece is getting at too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you don't actually understand it (and you don't), don't criticize it. Chesterton's Fence.
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.
there's also the problem of ending exploited since you will accept doing more for less
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.
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".
> Half of all the work done in the world is childcare and caring for the old.
This is a really profound statement, thanks for making me think slightly differently!
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.
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.
I recognize the creativity part, well put!
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.
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
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?
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
My work day is 8-5 and that’s the time I have to get everything done. That’s it. I don’t take work home so I better make the best of the day.
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.