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Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

I was most focused on my career after a breakup. The structure of the work environment coupled with the reward is pretty unparalleled.

Other things I can think of with structure usually have a kind of endless goal that can't be spent at your discretion. Rehab, fitness, organized religion. I've never done rehab, but it seems to overlap with fitness where even if you gamify it with achievements, its not like a game at all because you have to do the same achievement the next day and forever.

The earnings, advancement, structure and distraction do have their place especially when your personal relationships and life isn't going the way you want it.

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I find all of this so hard to relate with. I’ve worked for a decade, have a high paying job and have been promoted multiple times but to me none of it is enjoyable. I don’t think I could ever be happy in a situation where I’m required to do something for 9 hours everyday. I can’t get around the idea that all of this a weak abstraction to make money and care very little for approval from authority figures.

I think it depends upon the environment. What the GP said definitely resonates with me, but only at places where I had a large amount of control over what I worked on, and felt like my decisions / work affected the outcome of the company. I've noticed this mostly at smaller companies, and I imagine it could be similar in certain leadership roles.

I like my job but only for the contractual 8 hours a day. Nevertheless, I had a "this sucks and it's completely out of my control" moment recently and threw a bunch more time (and money) into making music. In part making music's always been an emotional regulator for me, but this time it was a very deliberate escape to fill my mind with composing so I don't leave myself space to think about the thing I don't want to think about.

So I think escapist workaholism needn't necessarily be for the boss man. Anything will do the job as long as it's sufficiently consuming.

What's common among the rest of the commenters is that the rest of their life was rendered emotionally uninhabitable. If you had nothing positive outside of work, maybe you would see it the same way they did.

> If you had nothing positive outside of work

Rather than having nothing positive, I think it's having negatives that they can't otherwise control.

> Rather than having nothing positive, I think it's having negatives that they can't otherwise control.

Not OP, but this critique revolves mostly around semantics and I don't find it useful or accurate. If, big if, they had something positive to look up to outside of work, they'd be less inclined to put all their energy into work. That'd be the case even with multiple negatives they couldn't control. In other words, it's the total lack of any and all upside outside of work rather than the existence of downsides that makes people feel powerless and depressed.

I make the distinction from a period of my own life. I also avoided going home despite having many positives because particular uncontrollable negatives held me back. I had many reasons to want to go back, but damn if I had to face the negatives.

‘Emotionally uninhabitable’ is a very useful phrase I’ve never encountered before

Honestly my home life is significantly calmer and more stable than my work life. Working in IT as a sysadmin, your entire work life consists an abundance of chaos, and a lot of things are out of your control that you can get blamed for anyway, even if you are not blamed for something out of your control, say office 365 is down. It still looks bad on you. It would be nice to work in an Industry with structure and actual rewards for your effort.

Yeah but you can change jobs and find better work with less fires far easier than changing your personal life.

Work makes a great distraction for someone who is very unhappy with their family life, has a lot of emotional suffering, or when someone feels entirely powerless over their life circumstances. The more you work the more you feel in control, and/or the more you distract yourself from your feelings. The pay and job duties don't matter so much, I know someone who is a workaholic on low paid low skill job.

If you don't have those personal issues, then yeah, you'd find it hard to relate to.

Person you replied to here: my fulfillment with employment was temporary. Like I said, I was - past tense - most fulfilled after a breakup, for some time.

I worked for other people during internships for a few years and after college for about 5 years before hitting a homerun. I've never done anything for a decade and would imagine being unfulfilled by that kind of conscription. I'm not the kind of person content with just a job, and I always loathed and scoffed at the surrogate "family" that some corporate environment and startup founders try to create.

As someone who currently has a pretty emotionally stable life and can totally relate to how you feel right now, I think the "emotionally stable" part is what prevents you from relating to the parent comment.

Back when I had a lot of emotionally turbulent events happening in my life, I was in the same boat as the parent comment you are replying to. Things in life going extremely sideways and leaving me heartbroken/depressed were what pushed me to that same kind of workaholism described above. Every single significant side project I wrote was during some awful-feeling events happening in my life. Those were also the times when I spent the least time doing "fun" things (e.g., videogames), because I just didn't feel like it.

That drive for me had nothing to do with the actual desire to make money or have career advancement, it was just a mirage. In fact, I would say I have more of the actual desire to make more money and advance in career when I am in "good times", but the drive isn't quite there. But when the "bad times" come, I have no actual desire for money/career advancement. I do however get that insane intrinsic drive to just get away from all the "bad things" in life at that time by diving deep into working/studying/etc. It wasn't about money, it was about doing something productive, because most of that work (at least for me) was just side projects that I didn't get paid a dime for, and neither was I expecting or cared to get paid for it.

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