Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Is it really true that in most cases people can find a day job that isn't a necessary evil? People usually work because they need money to live, and employers usually pay money because they want stuff done that is not interesting or enjoyable enough for anyone to do as a volunteer. Most jobs in developed countries are service jobs, and few of these are things people love to do, they're just things that need doing, and someone is willing to pay for them to be done: working restaurants, inserting IVs in hospitals, caring for elderly, picking up trash, cleaning offices, staffing call centers, answering email on behalf of the CEO, processing insurance claims, driving Ubers, etc.

So there is some amount of needing to do something you don't necessarily love for a job, but it's perfectly reasonable for you to also not want this to consume your life 24/7. I mean, if you can achieve the feat of the photo at the top of this article—getting paid to surf—that might be great, but that's not really the norm for jobs.

I think it's more a matter of being lucky enough to enjoy doing something which is valuable to others. It's easy to love what you do if your hobby is in demand.

Sometimes even those are pretty shitty jobs, though. My hobby is art.

Commissions really suck sometimes, as they aren't creative and generally aren't enough to live on. Comic book artists often work long days only to be greeted with pain at the end of the day. Hand cramps are the least of the worries: such artists often develop problems with their dominant arm, commonly carpal tunnel and tennis elbow. And these are usually contract jobs with no benefits whatsoever.

My mother is an excellent seamstress. Most paid work is wedding alterations, tailoring clothing, and sewing patches on military uniforms (decent demand here for quality work, which she does). That work absolutely bores her and she winds up hating her hobby.

Of course, these aren't exactly in demand per se but is illustrative of how things change once you are working for it. It really isn't all that easy.

Agree 100%. As they say, if you only had to do it when you felt like it, they wouldn't call it 'work'.

Even if your hobby is in demand, that still doesn't mean you'll love doing it on somebody else's terms. Like, I enjoy developing software, but I've had projects that I didn't particularly enjoy and constraints that rendered seemingly-enjoyable projects miserable.

I think it's more a matter of being lucky enough to enjoy doing something which is valuable to others.

Another way of looking at this is: rather than basing your enjoyment of life on pursuing a pleasant hobby (which you may or may not be able to get paid for), instead derive your enjoyment from doing things that need to be done.

In our society that translates roughly to "earning a living by helping others". If this is your source of satisfaction, you don't need very much luck.

Totally agree. Very out of touch to say most people want to work full time. They do not.

People usually work because they need money to live, and employers usually pay money because they want stuff done that is not interesting or enjoyable enough for anyone to do as a volunteer.

When I was first looking for a job out of college, I asked a couple of area technology companies if I could work for them for free. In both cases they told me that their corporate / legal policies wouldn't allow it.

Nowadays many tech companies are happy to take unpaid contributions to their software via pull requests. You could even do it as a full-time unpaid "job" if you wanted; pick a company that open-sourced their software and spend your time full-time improving it.

Not to mention unpaid internships...

Working for free isn't legal, unless it's an internship for which the intern received academic credit...(some other exceptions too).

Hopefully automation will reduce the need for humans to do the boring, repetitive jobs and increase the number of people working in jobs they find rewarding and interesting. I doubt we could eliminate the former completely and have everyone doing the latter, but it seems that automation may improve the ratio significantly.

I bet people said the same thing when Watt perfected the steam engine. I'm not buying it, workload will simply increase to compensate productivity improvements.

Ah, but if people said the same thing, people were right. The number of repetitive jobs (being a peasant, moving your hand up and down a loom) has indeed decreased.

Being a peasant (in the sense of someone working in the land, not as the subject to some feudal lord) was much more free and far less repetitive than being a factory worker (or an office drone for that matter).

People also don't understand how many free hours those people had (because a lot of farm work is seasonal).

Farmer in the winter sounds like an OK job as long as you had enough food stored away.

Depends on the place. The mediterranean winter (which I am aware of) in places like Spain, France, Italy, Greece, etc, was not that much of a deal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com