There's a fundamental spiritual divide between people. One side hates being alive from the moment they are born, so everything is suffering, especially work. The other side loves life and loves doing things.
I love working, it's being active in the world, it's rewarding and mentally developing. Other things get boring fast.
> There's a fundamental spiritual divide between people. One side hates being alive from the moment they are born, so everything is suffering, especially work. The other side loves life and loves doing things.
[citation needed]
:)
So even if people end up in these very black-and-white groups it's doubtful that they are predetermined. But it's more like it's a spectrum, and some people start from a very good place some from a very hard one. And there are many important and distinct factors affecting one's relationship with work, success, motivation, diligence. Not to mention that luckily people's life (and relationship with work) can get better.
The problem is that "everything is suffering, especially work" is a mindset at the end of the day. Most of us live in free enough countries where we are not assigned a class/vocation from birth.
If your job is so unrewarding or unfulfilling, try something else! You are not married to a job, you won't be court marshaled for leaving, and you likely won't be rewarded for trying to keep a "job for life" like our parents generation might have been.
Maybe you burned out and simply changing scenery will improve your life. Maybe you are in the wrong type of role and trying something new helps.
Exactly. Each of us is standing on the shoulders of giants - technological, scientific, commercial, political, and many other kinds of contributions.
Life may not be perfect, but we all live downstream from Ugh the Caveman who once held a blunt rock in each hand, decided to whack them together, and bootstrapped the entire human tech tree, all while facing lions, sabre-toothed tigers, mammoths, ice ages, terrible diseases, and hunger.
I like the way I’ve seen the inconveniences of life described as a tax one pays. Airplane delays are a tax on travel. Coordinating schedules is a tax on hanging out with friends. City noise is a tax on living in urban areas with vibrant street life.
Framed this way one can be more grateful and recognize that life is not frictionless. The more you try to make it frictionless the more frivolous your grievances become.
It is a spectrum for a while, until people generally fall into one of the poles. And starting in a hard place or an easy place has no influence to this attitude, in my experience.
That's a story you tell yourself about the internal lives of others, but it is not knowledge. You don't actually know what's inside other people's minds. All we ever catch are glimpses of each other.
It's tempting to make sweeping generalizations about others to explain the ways they confound and frustrate us. But it's essential to hew to the truth and accept that life is ambiguous, people are baffling, and simplistic narratives do more to give us comfort and reinforce our biases than they do explain the world around us.
I’m not sure this claim has any more validity than his. Calling people unknowable flies in the face of a bunch of modern disciplines. We can see people behave very predictably with Game Theory, for example.
Still, I respect the view that the individual is private unto themselves in a profound way. But I would also say people tend to show you what they believe in how they act. If you pay attention you will begin to notice when someone has put their hopes in power, finances, achievement, or ideology, to give a few popular examples. And it’s not about what people say animates them, or even about what they believe about themselves—it’s how they act.
"People respond to incentives and we can model this with game theory" is a model that notably does not assume anything about the content of people's character or mind. And it frequently fails to explain the behavior of individuals, because you may not understand the incentive landscape they're in. You may offer to pay someone to do something, and it sucks the joy out of it for them, or they feel offended by your offer, and they become less likely to do it.
There's light-years of difference between observing an individual person's actions and drawing conclusions about what they believe (this is in line with what I was referring to with "catching glimpses") and generalizing to conclude that everyone is predestined to be either enthusiastic and lively or a miserable wretch. It's far more likely you caught someone on a good or bad day, to pick just one alternative hypothesis. People contain multitudes.
I also pay attention to the difference between what people say and what they do, and I agree it is meaningful and would even says it's a critical part of being around people. But it's easy to get carried away and pretend we know more than we really do, simplistic stories that explains everyone's behavior is very seductive. A model's ability to generalize is inversely proportional to how powerful it's predictions are. Stories like this that take people and bin them into two groups that control their destiny have huge predictive power - and apply to almost nobody.
Whereas to return to game theory, assuming people are black boxes that optimize some unknown and idiosyncratic utility function which we infer based on their revealed preferences can apply to nearly everyone and everything. But it's predictions are very narrow in scope. You can use an A/B test to optimize any change to any UI flow, and it'll tell you which one converts better. But it won't tell you why.
>I love working (...) it's rewarding and mentally developing
Some work may be these things, but not all work. If your work is consistently both then there is a good chance your work involves some creation that is satisfying you.
I do agree that taking the morality out of our everyday tasks can greatly affect our outlook on life.
If you're not willing to engage with what they have to say charitably, maybe you should just leave it. Their comment is plainly relevant to yours, and "shutting down conversation" is not at all a good faith interpretation. It is a huge weakness in your argument that you say people should leave jobs that aren't stimulating to them, when we live in a world where people have to work to survive and frequently cannot make decisions on that basis.
Imagine for a moment you are talking to someone who works a minimum wage job at McDonald's to provide for their children. How do you imagine they would respond to your suggestion they abandon their responsibility to their children to find a more mentally stimulating job? How would that be anything but patently absurd?
> How do you imagine they would respond to your suggestion they abandon their responsibility to their children to find a more mentally stimulating job?
Did I say that? Also, there's a career ladder at McDonalds open for all their employees. Apart from this, the skills you learn at McDonalds is transferable to other occupations in the same sector or other sectors. I should know, I worked those kind of jobs, much worse than McDonalds. So it's quite easy for me to imagine what that's like.
I'm not going to entertain the idea that somebody is locked into their current occupation for life, unless they are a literal slave. My suggestions and advice has no benefit for people who are enslaved, but does that mean that the ideas cannot be discussed at all? Does your comment have any benefit for somebody in that situation? Maybe we should never discuss exercise and health because some people have medical conditions? We shouldn't discuss diet and cooking because some people have allergies, and so on.
Most of us need to work to survive, so let's make the best of it. I also need to sleep to survive, and I do my best to enjoy it. The same with eating etc.
The replies to my initial comment demonstrates the spiritual divide. Just by me stating that i love working, people here get the wildest assumptions into their head, because they cannot imagine anybody enjoying work by and for itself.
Yes, you kinda did say that. You said people should leave their jobs if they weren't stimulating, and when someone pointed out this was lacking in nuance, you waved it off completely. Now you're dismissing anyone who is in that situation, oh they're just a slave, of course my remarks don't apply to slaves.
So yeah, you are refusing to acknowledge the flaws in your argument or the reality of people who don't have the privilege to prioritize their own enrichment over other responsibilities. And I'm not very impressed with that.
> Does that mean that the ideas cannot be discussed at all?
Just because someone challenges your ideas doesn't mean they're trying to shut you out of the conversation. I'm engaging in conversation with you. I wouldn't respond, and certainly wouldn't respond with questions, if I just wanted you to stop talking. Again, this is not a good faith interpretation of my criticism.
> You said people should leave their jobs if they weren't stimulating
If you have dominated your work completely, generally you are looking for a promotion. And if you can't get it, then you start looking for another place to work. You don't have to leave your current job before you've found your next job. But it doesn't matter that I explain this, because spiritually negative people will find just another negative perspective to latch on to. Because life to them is only suffering and misery from birth to death, no matter what.
What's your advice to those who don't have the "privilege"? Can you help them? Or do you think that is my duty?
I appreciate your thoughtful replies. Sorry to have not expanded more before.
I think agree with you in spirit but maybe from a slightly different perspective. I see people divided between whether they spend the time they have control over consuming vs creating (content, art, whatever) more-so than their “work” but work is a pretty loose term.
I enjoy working on things. I enjoy pulling the weeds in my garden and I enjoy the sanding of my woodworking pieces. There is no morality in those individual tasks to me and I like a nice healthy garden and beautiful furniture.
Also, I’ve yet to have a salaried job where I wanted less three day weekends.
You are right that these topics are hard to talk about.
Or maybe some people don't get the chance to work on things that are rewarding and mentally developing? Not all work is equal.
Maybe have some gratitude that your work has given that to you, rather than assuming that other people who are drained by their work are somehow spiritually inferior.
These people are drained long before they enter the work force. And no matter what job they have they will be drained by it. You probably saw a good chunk of them in school.
One of the things that opened up my eyes to how much of life is mindset & purpose was, ironically, dealing with some of the very wealthy in NYC.
Some of the most anxious, unhappy, complaining people I met were the underemployed spouses of the very well off. And this isn't a sexist statement because it was both women and men. And some good percent of them had no kids either. Truly no responsibilities.
The kind of people who I'd bump into at the gym just after sunrise on the way to a long day of work, and they lament to me how their weekly in-home massage got cancelled due to a scheduling conflict, and they just don't know what to do with their day. LOL.
One can be happy or unhappy at any objective income/wealth/stress level. You'd be very surprised.
Yeah I think you've sort of touched on something there.
Many of my hardworking friends also have interesting hobbies/interests outside work they pursue and are known for. Arts, literary, cuisine, gardening, sports, charity, whatever. Generally putting more out into the world in other non-work venues.
However practically none of my more "slacker" friends have anything to show for their time outside of work. They define life more in terms of what they are avoiding. Hobbies are more consumptive - watching TV/film, dining out, travel, etc.
Maybe at the end of the day being good at any one thing takes some intellectual ability, commitment and effort.. so once you've applied that in one area you are likely able to do so elsewhere.
The older I get the more I look at this bifurcation in terms of - wtf am I going to do in retirement.
You read a lot of early retirement experiences and the people that "retire to something" (a hobby/volunteer work/etc) do much better than those that "retire from something" (can't wait to stop working!).
I love working but, after two years of not taking vacations – due to several reasons that I should’ve anticipated – oh boy how much I’d like to take a rest. I counting the days until I can take a few weeks off.
It's not this simple. A lot of people revel in suffering because they have a faulty mindset that good things can only come from bad things. Meaning, success comes with blood, sweat, and tears.
This is not true, generally. There is such a thing as free lunch. Not everything must be a battle, and not every battle has a winner.
Some people lean into work because they believe that by sacrificing they will discover the key to happiness. So they sacrifice things that feel good, like spending time laughing with friends or maybe delicious food. In short, they shrink their lives, purposefully removing the good parts. Some go so far as to remove good parts for absolutely no gain. Maybe they're gluten-free, but they're not gluten intolerant. Some are even purposefully lonely in some extreme sacrifice of human nature. Almost like monks or cardinals - they believe if they sacrifice something so fundamental, like sex or love, that they will achieve something other's cannot.
The truth is a lot of that sacrifice will be for nothing. Sometimes the right choice is doing something stupid, or doing something unproductive.
That is a very deep truth that you're stating, and also very hard for many people to learn. I've tried asking these kind of people if they believe that Martin Luther or Vladimir Lenin is going to reward them after death for their faithfulness, but the thing most closely to an explanation that I've gotten is that they can throw it into the faces of the townspeople that they worked hard while the others didn't.
ah, if only the rest of us had the willpower to simply choose to not suffer and to enjoy life instead.
Seriously, who do you talk to that enables such viewpoints? I suspect not many people want to talk to you after their shift.
Work isn't the problem; it's doing bullshit work that's undervalued so that morons who don't work can eat. This has held true at every part of the pay scale. It's just the compensation on the upper end helps you have hope you may find meaningful work that can feed you.
I suspect we all WANT to work. We just need to eat, too.
I love working, it's being active in the world, it's rewarding and mentally developing. Other things get boring fast.