Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

This makes me consider:

1. Being able (or expected) to enjoy your work is a relatively new thing in human society.

2. There's a set amount of people who will be passionate (or not) about their work no matter what, and for these people it's more about personalities or culture. I am thrilled to do software development, but I would also be thrilled to work in a coffee store. I'd also be thrilled to make pizzas all day, every day, or to push carts around a parking lot all day and help old people load their groceries. I've loved every job I've ever had, from landscaping to tutoring. How do the "Me's" factor in to this percent?

So I wonder two things:

How many people would say they are passionate about their work 100 years ago? 200? 300?

What are the bounds that it can reasonably be? In other words, whats the least and most it could reasonably be in a population? Even if everyone were farming serfs, whats the % going to look like? Will it be around 82%? More? Less?

I have a strong suspicion (cultural?) attitude and economic conditions (are you being taken care of? good food/healthcare/places to go?) has a lot more to do with it than anything else.

Being able (or expected) to enjoy your work is a relatively new thing in human society.

I can't make a claim about the broader state of the history of ideas, but I do know the idea is found in the Bible.

   I have seen personally what is the only beneficial 
   and appropriate course of action for people: to eat 
   and drink, and find enjoyment in all their hard work
   on earth during the few days of their life which God
   has given them, for this is their reward. 
      Ecclesiastes 5:18

So the idea is at least a couple millenia old. I'd expect it to be popular wisdom as well, independent of its inclusion in the Bible. It's pretty sound advice.

I tend to think that its the concept of work (outside the home) is relatively new in human society. Years ago, people generally just had to survive by doing whatever it was that provided for their families. They grew crops, raised animals or hunted, and some were craftsmen. They were (mostly) able to do these things from home, with their families, on their own terms, and feel a sense of accomplishment. Did they think about enjoying their work? Work was life, and if times were good they were happy.

These days, we have two different lives. We have our family life, and we have our work life. The two are disconnected. We endure our daily commutes and work for big corporations. We have no voice in the way things are done, and a lot of the time it can be hard to see any meaning in our work even in good times.

Sorry for rambling...

The historical question is very interesting, and I'm going to have to look into that more. But I suspect that artisans (a class that has changed a lot, if not died out completely) were very passionate about their work.

With the huge amount of hours that a knowledge worker spends at his day job, I personally feel that it's almost never worth it to have a job you don't enjoy. There just aren't enough hours in the day to do enough exciting things, once you subtract a healthy amount of sleep, maintenance tasks, and the day job. It certainly isn't worth it at the typically small compensation differences between jobs.

>1. Being able (or expected) to enjoy your work is a relatively new thing in human society.

I don't know how true this is, one of Marx's key criticism of Capitalism was the idea that, under capitalism, workers were alienated from their work, because they were unable to find true autonomy and determinism in what they did, nor reap the true value of what they produced. So I don't think the concept that work should also be fulfilling is entirely new, if Marx was lamenting its demise over 100 years ago.

100 years is very recent in human history. And enjoying your work seems to be a very Western idea. My Chinese immigrant father is resigned to finding his career as an electrical engineer boring and meaningless, for example.

you may find Lev Gumilev's book "Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere" interesting, in particular the fifth chapter, Drive in Ethnogenesis - http://bit.ly/cSnuEN

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