Don’t sweat it; it might be healthy. I have made it a feature of my life that I don’t actually care about work and will not be changing it. It turned out that I’d spent at least 20 years being tricked into caring for things which ultimately someone else leveraged most of the benefit for with measly returns by proportion on that investment of time back to me. Never a thank you, always difficult to extract any entitlements from it.
Another thing to note is my father who had completely invested his entire life into this way of thinking and is currently spending his retirement with bad mental and physical health. That’s the end game these working practices tend to lead into.
It’s true that you should work to live, not live to work.
You can care about your career and your self improvement while still maintaining healthy boundaries around the mental effort expended for your job. We’re in it for a long time but jobs come and go
Why not? You can care about delivering beautiful code. You can care about ensuring the workplace is a pleasant place to work for all. You can care about your relationships you’re building. You may even be a huge fan of the product you’re building. That doesn’t mean you need to shit a brick when someone comes running in with their hair on fire—it’s not a binary proposition. Caring about things can be done “a la carte” and you can simply just not care about the bullshit
At least to me, of the best things about this attitude is that the working culture starts to matter a lot when you search for jobs. That's what you care about. You look for places where relationship building is important and people try to get along and support each other. Other stuff starts to matter less. Lots of places basically put so much pressure on you to deliver that being a decent human being becomes impossible.
If my choice is between working at a boring job where I can support my colleagues, and an exciting job with cool tech where people are having mental breakdowns and nobody has the mental space to support them, I'll take the boring job where people don't care about stupid directives and dealines from above.
Exactly. You can even care about your product and its users, but not care that it went down for a couple hours last tuesday or launched 4 weeks later than a made-up deadline.
I agree, and I still don’t have an answer for this dilemma. I don’t know if I’m the problem, or if it is the structure of our society.. In the meantime the only thing that I know is that I have to choose between not caring and feeling like I’m wasting most of my day, and caring with the potential abuse of an employer
Next time around I'll be sure to get born wealthy so I don't have to worry about it. But it's incredibly privileged to be able to do the sort of work we do compared to standing in a factory production line or working away from family. I enjoy my work, but I know if the company fails it's not my fault and I will be working somewhere else tomorrow.
Another thing to note is my father who had completely invested his entire life into this way of thinking and is currently spending his retirement with bad mental and physical health. That’s the end game these working practices tend to lead into.
It’s true that you should work to live, not live to work.