Comment by 65827 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 65827 | Hacker News Reader

This touches on something that's been bugging me for awhile, and I think it's related to all the harm people do in the process of furthering their careers. Most people's goal seems to be either to get into that perfect career spot or do ANYTHING to maintain that current job they acquired.

Everything else is secondary. Family, religion, strong personal beliefs, politics, getting treated for substance abuse, etc etc. Everything is less important than that career, you are not a real man or woman if you don't have a job and don't provide for your family. Everything important is disregarded to further one's own career (I HAVE to fly to this conference, I have a super important career and all that carbon emission nonsense is for other people or other days).

When this all goes away and nobody works unless they want to the shift is going to break so many fucking brains. I really hope people can embrace the shift and work on self improvement and curiosity above all, but my hunch is most people with this idea that their job completely defines them won't handle the transition very well.

That's the wrong way of looking at it. Question why people are like that. Humans aren't infatuated with their work by some corporate conspiracy. Work has always defined the individual. Look at the history and origins of family names.

> Humans aren't infatuated with their work by some corporate conspiracy

I don't think he/she implied that.

That's only in post agricultural societies. Look at most Pacific new Guinea tribes (where scarcity isn't much of an issue) and you see a lot more focus on social networks and leisure time.

> Look at the history and origins of family names.

Yeah, largely derived from occupation or location [0], at least in the West. They've lost their meaning though. Example: I'm a German-American kid named Scott; as in "from Scotland." This has always bothered me.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surname#Typology

Right. It doesn't mean much anymore, but it certainly has history. OP seems to think this infatuation with work is a new phenomenon.

> Look at the history and origins of family names

Governments of the time forced (conspired to force?) people to pick a family name for identification and tax purposes and many simply picked their profession, location, or fathers name. Some families were multigenerational smiths for example but that had more to do with the the way people learned their trades.

I agree, you constantly see posts and discussions on the elusive concept of "work-life balance". People don't stop and take the time to address their personal needs and just concentrate on the career.

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