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Comment by bobthechef | Hacker News Reader

Maybe people are failing to understand that work is often uninteresting. The expectation that it will be and must be can itself be a cause of despair.

From the economic perspective, no one cares whether you find your work interesting. You don't either when you buy a product or a service. Someone is paying you for some product or service, not to make your life fun. That's your problem. You think everyone else is having lot of fun at work? You want to go tell them how uniquely awful your life is? How you thought work was supposed to be a 24/7 orgasm? How your jobs is about _you_ and _your_ jollies and not the client or the user?

Perhaps a maximum 40hr work week would be a better industry benefit than free snacks and the other goofy gimmicks that companies like Google like to ply people with. That way, you can spend the extra time on your hobbies.

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To the first order this is correct, but don't forget that people are much more productive when the work is engaging. As a contrived example, suppose you waste a third of your time on some wacky things to make your work life more fun and become 5x more productive as a result. From the economic perspective it is a bargain! OTOH, if a lot of capable people are leaving the industry or operating at 0.2x capacity as a result of burnout, it is a massive economic inefficiency.

Agreed on the goofy gimmicks part though. They get old very fast.

This reminds me of the psychologist Daniel Nettle's assertion that there are 3 levels of happiness. The most basic is the immediate feeling of pleasure, like what you get from having sex or watching a sunset. I think you're right that some people naively think work should be like that day to day and their own intellectual stimulation is a primary concern for anyone else.

But there are also other forms of happiness. One is a generalized sense of well-being. Another is a sense of growth or flourishing and fulfilling one's potential. I think it's sort of natural that people associate these things with their careers (especially the latter). And I understand why it's disheartening to feel that at the end of the day you're a cog in a machine, that your work may actually be damaging to your well-being and distracting or sucking away time and energy from things that would allow you to flourish. Worst of all for many people in tech, you may feel that the work you do is actually net harmful to not just yourself but to your coworkers and your users.

I think you're right to call out people to take responsibility for themselves and to realize the world doesn't owe them anything, but I also think it's a more nuanced issue and there are some easy traps to fall into out there.

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