The complicated reality of doing what you love | Hacker News Reader

The complicated reality of doing what you love

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343 pointsherbertl183 comments

Most of the dissonance comes from the fact that a job is much more than the core activity.

When we speak of pottery as a hobby, we think of handling clay, sitting in front of a pottery wheel, choosing a fitting glaze, then admiring our finished work. The focus is on exploring and enjoying the process. You have complete control over the process and you can do as much or as little as you like because there is no delivery pressure. Sounds fun!

But a pottery business is a different beast. Now, the act of making the pottery is a much smaller part of the overall workload. You have to deal with marketing, sales, payments, inventory, and communications. Your pottery time is no longer about exploring, but about replenishing inventory or handling custom orders in time to avoid bad reviews. You can't just make a piece and be done with it, you have to carefully pack it, handling shipping, drop it off, and hope that nothing goes wrong. If it does go wrong, you now have to deal with the fallout and handle angry customers. Most customers are fine, but it only takes 1 irrationally outraged customer to ruin your day.

Hobbies, by definition, can't be a job. You can try to make a job or business that includes your hobby, but it's a superset of the hobby with numerous other activities that you may or may not enjoy.

I do actually know a lot of people who enjoy running businesses. You might say that businesses are their hobby and delivering results to customers is their passion. Not surprisingly, they're doing quite well in both business and the mental health department. Lucky.

This was the breakthrough my wife had when we were discussing this: there was no way she could do that for a living. She likes experimenting, and that's not part of a chef, except for some very high rated people.

I am one of the lucky people that love its profession (software development) and it is also my hobby. I'm not sure how to identify the non-coding parts, I enjoy those in the profession too, but more because I like to do very well and being good at those other parts is an integral part of it. To be fair, making a team more effective goes also to my benefit, where I can do more interesting work.

There’s still a world of difference between hobby and professional software development. In hobby software you fix the bugs that you fix; in professional software you fix the bugs that your paying customers hit. I think it’s why free software has had limited success in end-user applications.

I can see that, what I'm trying to say though is that I don't know in which category I fit: hobby and professional are bot very engaging, sometimes I want to work at the stuff fot my job, other times for my pet projects. How would you define this given the premise of the op?

A different take: in professional software, you fix the things your boss tells (or allows) you to fix, while in free software, you fix the things that need to be fixed. I think that's why I find most commercial software to be a trash fire compared to free software.

In application software? Which ones, specifically?

Loving what you do is the key to having a happy work life, not doing what you love. Your approach seem to embody that concept.

That could be a thing, but I achieved this unconsciously, so it's all luck.

By contrast, I was miserable through the entirety of high school and a good chunk of university: I _really wanted to code_ and nothing else at the time. For the surrounding parts of being a developer, I think I appreciate those more or less by maturing taste. Same way as the first beer you have is terrible, then you discover the interesting parts.

Also yes, I'm very happy at work, I was happy even in bad situations for some weird reason. But I'm also very happy in life in general, so it's probably a combination of both.

I spent six years working as a lawyer and absolutely despised it. Early on during this hell I rediscovered a curiosity in programming I had as a child. I became obsessed with it and within about six months knew I had to try to do it as a career.

It took me four years but I did it. What I will say is this -- I have definitely lost a hobby, in the sense that a hobby should be something that allows you to be creative while not feeling or reminding you of work. While I was still a lawyer, software dev (and learning it) was my hobby. I would be at work dreaming of coming home so I could tweak whatever project I was working on.

Now that I'm getting paid for it, I am completely in love with my job. Partly it's that I work for a great company now -- e.g., we get 25 days PTO (and yes, it's an American company, and no, I'm not a senior level). But partly it's that I spent time on the other side -- doing something purely because it provided me with money. Is programming work now? Yes, definitely -- but it's work I love doing.

However, I realized quickly after I started that I no longer felt like programming very much when I came home. I know that's kind of a no-no to admit to in this field, but it's true. I still do go through phases where I'll go really deep on some project for a while. But mostly I'm content to let my programming happen on the job. When I do program at home, it's still fun but it's colored by all the new relationships the activity has to work.

Yep. I would never have guessed how little time I would spend coding some weeks.

I just started my first SWE job and I'm having a similar realization. So much decision making needs to happen before anything is even considered worth working on. As a junior, I sit silently in a ton of meetings about things that I don't even know about, haha. When my direct superior assigns me something, I get it done, ask her questions if necessary, and move on to the next task.

This is why I like remote. I have no input on these meetings, so I can work instead of being a mushroom.

I like remote because I can work on my mushrooms during work hours

I’ve worked at the same company for 20 years. For the first 17 years another developer and myself were embedded in a business unit. I’d say we spent 90% of our time coding. Then they decided we should be integrated into IT. We since been made to adopt agile practices and all the meetings that go along with it. I’d say I spend about 5% of my work week coding now. The rest of the time is in meetings. I’m absolutely astonished at how many meetings the IT organization manages to create. I still don’t see the purpose. All these agile practices haven’t made our code any better. We are just writing far far far less of it. I’m kind of astonished anyone ever manages to get anything done.

So how's the job hunt going?

I guess that is the downside of being 20 years at the same company.

Eh, I'm not looking. The benefits are way too good and I live only 2 miles from campus (I can bike there in 15 minutes, though, I haven't been there since March 2020). If they want to waste my time with meetings, that's on them. They pay me way too much for me to complain.

Planning to retire soon?

No, I still have kids in school. No point in retiring until all the kids are done with college (to make sure I can help pay for their college).

Very well said. A friend of mine worked at a winery and he was very enthusiastic about his work -- he loved making the best wine he possibly could.

He recently bought his own winery and, to his (and my) surprise, maybe 5% of his job involves interacting with the winemaking process. The vast majority of his job concerns compliance with regulation, bookkeeping, and communicating with vendors/suppliers.

I think it's good to have a holistic view of an industry before you dive into it. There are a ton of "housekeeping" things to be done in every industry, but in a sufficiently large company, you're often shielded from the things that aren't your direct concern.

I'm surprised that both of you were surprised that most of his job comprises of logistics. That's kind of how things tend to work.

from outside, when not dealing with the logistics, you do not have an understanding of just how many logistics there are. This is why developers think managers don't do anything.

Developers are inside. We see managers. Some of them in some companies are useful. Others in other companies don't.

As a developer I don't think I get to see most of what a manager does, other than they are in meetings all day long that I don't attend. So I am not inside the logistics of what they do. But I guess you attend all the meetings your managers do and you know everything they do?

That seems to be a surprisingly inefficient company structure.

I think the most common mistake is the assumption that the coordination by the manager is essential to supply direction and avoid errors and mistakes. This is consistently assumed without actually measuring the amount and severity of mistakes without management direction.

I know I can trust my people to coordinate themselves with very low error rates as long as I provide them with the information and incentives they need to make the correct decisions by themselves.

The total cost of extra full time managers is significantly larger than the measured error cost.

Some of the common management tasks will be loaded onto leaf node staff. This costs less, mostly since they aggressively minimise those tasks to the bare minimum friction while a full time manager tend not to.

It is not 1950. We can trust our people to function much better given the right environment and tools. I've run several large complex international projects with very low management overhead.

>I think the most common mistake is the assumption that the coordination by the manager is essential to supply direction and avoid errors and mistakes.

I mean there are different levels of managers, there is your direct manager who probably just needs to delegate some tasks and trust you to manage yourself, and then manage their local budget, but there are managers also of a division with multiple groups in there and they have to manage stuff about budgets that takes into account legal requirements that people lower than them really aren't aware of.

anecdote time about this managerial level (I've told this anecdote before here) - one time I was consulting at a place and they had these Friday breakfasts for about 7-9 teams together (so about 100+ people in a big warehouse eating danish breakfast) and the division managers would sometimes say some things about what was going to happen in the next few months. So, one time the main guys for all the teams gave this speech about why they were doing something in a particular way and it went very deep detail about accounting rules and a particular financing law that applied so that was why they were structuring the next 9 months work in the way they were because it allowed them use a half a million dollars etc. etc.

Everyone was nodding sagely along as if they understood what they were hearing, but I knew a lot of them didn't understand anything, I didn't understand it all either - I just knew I was hearing the managerial equivalent of nerd speak - like the way I would talk about engineering tradeoffs.

A lot of the developers there spent their time going around talking about how these two guys did nothing and were useless, because from the 'outside' of their work it would look like they just sat around talking.

Maybe they are not as useful as other workers, but I do know that I am not able to adequately judge it from what little details I observe about their daily routines.

It's mostly miss-aligned incentive structures and internal politics. Managers are trying to climb up the ladder, increase influence, get more reports and at the same time keep competing interests from doing the above.

I think it feels slightly different when you're doing it, because internal politics is mostly stuff like "team C has created a new service to do something you'll be doing" and you're trying to work out whether it exists yet, whether it solves your problems, whether it's super buggy, what the roadmap looks like, etc.

If you pick wrong you could end up integrating with something that is vapourware or causes issues, yet if you refuse to pick what is offered it can be treated by the other manager/team as a huge insult and then a narrative can be crafted and verbalised to upper management that it was a non-strategic play on your behalf and wasteful of company resources, etc.

Working within this context with other managers and teams, means constantly needing to understand what they're trying to achieve and offering a helping hand, while protecting yourself from bad decisions that would negatively affect your own team. Even if you aren't trying to climb the ladder yourself, you have to avoid actions that harm your team.

This might be inefficient, but once others are playing this game, you have to be really aware about what is going on, and ensure that you're always playing the right hand.

perfect illustration https://ncase.me/trust/ of the dynamics

Where did you find this? That’s amazing

You don't need to be on every single meeting to get general idea about which manager is adding value and which is not.

I don't need to be expert in management to see that corporate management where managers almost outnumbered team members, changed every few months and attempted to manage without ever learning what product does was bad.

> This is why developers think managers don't do anything.

A programming dev manager told me years ago that his mornings were spent dropping by each member of the team. He'd ask how they were doing, and what they were working on.

He'd then gently nudge them back onto what they were supposed to be working on.

Because they were always working on the wrong thing, or because he had just interrupted them with chitchat?

Usually this sort of thing occurs when management perceive fixing technical debt as a distraction instead of an investment.

That's the cynical take - not that it doesn't happen, but there's a lot of reasons why a manager might have better context for what is important to work on at any given moment that are genuinely useful. For example: business priorities (not just "tech debt" vs "tick feature boxes", but "which of these 8 aspects of this feature should we build first", etc.), more experience in what aspects of a problem are worth spending time on, being more connected to what others are doing around the business in different departments, having more time talking to customers to know what their real pain points are, etc. etc.

In fact, as a manager in my current team I probably spend more time nudging people to fix technical debt they've forgotten about because they're excited to work on the next feature than vice versa. In other teams I've spent more time cautioning away from writing functionality that isn't needed right now to avoid overengineering the solution.

How you communicate that guidance and extra context has to depend on the team, what works for one won't necessarily work for another. What you found to be terrible another developer might love - as a developer who now has some management responsibilities I had to learn that some people actually want a lot more management than I would have ever wanted - my "micromanagement" is their "I am supported and know what's going on".

Anyway I'm not saying there aren't bad managers out there (or that I'm a good one), but it's a lot more nuanced than you imply, and what you might hate in a manager others might actively seek out.

It’s bad management to drop by people’s desk every day to check in with them, then “nudge” them. I’d say that’s a failure of product vision, strategy, communication and leadership.

> my "micromanagement" is their "I am supported and know what's going on".

What you’re really seeing here is people grasping at any life preserver they can grab in an incredibly poorly run organization. In a well run organization management is extremely hands off, because the machine runs smoothly and scales.

If you've worked on both sides of engineering and management, you'll discover it's a lot more nuanced than that. Many engineers don't need managing. Many more do. Many need micromanaging.

I’ve worked both and micromanaging is never good. For one, it doesn’t scale. It’s also indicative of poor process, communication and documentation.

> It’s also indicative of poor process, communication and documentation.

I recall one engineer in a team of 20 or so that, whenever he ran into a problem, he'd stop, fold his hands, and sit back in his chair. And wait until the manager noticed this, would come by, ask what the problem was, fix it for him, and he'd then proceed.

You could say this was all the manager's fault, but the rest of the team did not behave this way.

Another time, I recall one who needed micromanaging. Eventually it turned out he was on drugs.

> whenever he ran into a problem, he'd stop, fold his hands, and sit back in his chair. And wait until the manager noticed this, would come by, ask what the problem was, fix it for him, and he'd then proceed.

Certainly there are better ways to communicate than looking to see if someone is sitting back in their chair. Either they are delivering or they are not. If not, a good manager will ask what the problem is, then fix it. Not delivering should be a temporary state, if it’s not, that employee may not be a good fit for the org.

I mean I would totally agree with this but sometimes you end up in a situation with someone like the described engineer; obviously you should get rid of them - but getting rid of people quickly and efficiently is not possible in every organization and country therefore managers sometimes need to manage someone that should be gotten rid of because it is not the propitious time to get rid of them.

Yeah, because it's NEVER the programmer's fault, they're always perfect :-)

Of course not, but micromanagement is never the answer. I will say there are a lot more decent programmers out there than there are managers. Many programmers are motivated by curiosity, 90% of managers are motivated by ego. Wfh is going to decimate the latter as egoless orgs become the norm.

perhaps the devs on his team were the kind apt to go down interesting rabbit holes.

Because they were always drifting off onto something more fun.

> from outside, when not dealing with the logistics, you do not have an understanding of just how many logistics there are

For any particular situation, sure. But I think it's a very safe assumption that most your effort will be put into logistics or other admin-like tasks rather than the thing you think you'll be doing.

This seems to be a very common occurrence, so I was surprised the GP and their friend did not realize what they were in for.

That's because a huge chunk of them really don't do anything -- but let's not hijack the thread back to programming.

Logistics are an important part of many areas indeed. Programming though? Depends. I've been in companies where DevOps / sysadmins were 5x more than the programmers and they still were struggling, and I've been in companies where 1-2 guys standardized a deployment process over the course of a week and then didn't touch it for years.

> This is why developers think managers don't do anything.

I've started doing more managerial things at work, and it's given me a lot more appreciation for what managers do. Not sure I want management to be the majority of my job long term, but doing a "tour of duty" has been quite eye opening.

It's probably the ratio that's most surprising. Sure, most people probably know there'll be bookkeeping and other tasks, just not the degree. I wouldn't be surprised if most people imagine something like 50/50 at worst.

Some might also be surprised by how distinct the logistics/admin work is. For instance, they may think that since it's bookkeeping for a winery it's still work related to something they love, thus enjoyable. Then, they realize bookkeeping is bookkeeping, which further emphasizes how much time they're spending on not the thing they love (logistics/admin).

Joel Spolsky article about exactly this, but for programming: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/04/11/the-development-ab...

I saw an artist friend comment on a "how to freelance" article that "that sounds like running a business, not being an artist." And therein lies the rub - the actual value-creation part of running a consulting business is a tiny part of the work required.

I'm slowly starting to find that the business stuff is becoming a hobby as well, which is good because I'm resenting it far less than I used to.

I have turned two of my hobbies into businesses that are now full-time work for myself and part time work for two others (my wife and an employee we hired a couple of months back).

For me, the fact that you have to sell/market something isn't what makes it a stressful; I enjoy that aspect of it too.

Instead, I find most of the stress coming from the high stakes (if I make mistakes or work slowly, my business will fail and my children will grow up without a present father) and need to hyper-optimise (every single action is about maximising the amount of dollars earned per hour spent working).

I've found immense peace in the last few months in cleaning, of all things. It's not a traditional hobby, but the fact that I can make mistakes (or just not do it at all if I'm tired) with minimal consequences makes it so much less stressful than my businesses which do revolve around "traditional" hobbies.

My grandma used to say that happy people don't clean. People clean, and then they are happy.

I think it is a form of craftmanship like any other.

The moment you start accepting paymeny your hobby is no longer. You are now engaged in a business transaction. You now have deadlines and expectation aka responsibility. The beauty of a hobby is there is none.

In the same vein, I followed a few hobbyist beer brewers on a local home brewing forum go pro and the came to the same conclusion - making it your job takes all the fun out brewing.

You’re no longer experimenting or putting taste first, you want to convert grains into bottled beer as fast and cheap as possible so you can make a profit.

I think one trick to get around this is by delegating and if possible automating the parts you don't like.

Unfortunately its much easier said than done because it takes meticulous planning and long time to set it up. But it can be done and after that you can spend a good amount of time doing what you love and get a lot of help with the parts you don't enjoy.

As a matter of fact if you are able to successfully delegate the parts you don't enjoy the overall result is much much better.

So much this. I tried starting a business doing something I love and I found out I don’t love doing accounts and supply chain management for it. I canned it and a £20k investment within a year.

Now I do something I dislike that I’m good at. This is the best balance I have found as the contrast from work is vast when I do the things I love and that is important. Also it forces your motivations to be efficient and decisions to be in favour of things you love which inevitably ends up with more time to do them.

One of my hobby is board gaming. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen decide that they love board games so much that they open their own FLGS (friendly local game store). I’ve learned that the quickest way to come to hate board games is opening your own board game store. If you want to start hating your hobby, make it into a business.

> If you want to start hating your hobby, make it into a business.

Or as I've heard it phrased: "If you turn your vacation into your vocation, you'll never have a vacation again".

Yes, when I hire new people in Machine Learning they are uniformly surprised by how little time they spend modelling and how much time is spent gathering business requirements, refining what needs to be optimized, cleaning the incoming data, thinking about edge cases and so on.

This blows my mind. How does one get the skills to do ML without spending an infinitude of time cleaning data? Like the other stuff makes sense (general business process), but the lack of understanding around cleaning data from many juniors just stuns me.

What you say is somewhat true but I also know plenty of people who love what they do. I suspect famous examples are say Brad Bird or Steven Spielberg. I have a feeling they loved directing.

I know Sid Meier, when he was still at Microprose, he made a deal with his partner, Bill Stealey, to give up he direct business interest in the company so he could focus on game dev. They'd pay him $$$$$$$$ for each game and he no longer had to deal with the business decisions.

The point is you can find a way to delegate the parts you don't like.

I have plenty of friends that run their own game dev companies. They love it. One has 150 employees, one has 10, another 20, one has 3, another has 10. They're are still doing dev, not just managing, even the one with 150 people and they love it.

> The point is you can find a way to delegate the parts you don't like.

So it is possible to do what you like (without considering the compensation), but probably not for everyone. Likely only for a lucky few.

Is that what your saying? Because that what I think is whats going on in the current economic model we live in.

I'm not sure your point. If your point was the delegating the parts you don't like means someone else has to do no fun parts, another solution is to find someone that likes those other parts. For example, Sid Meier's partner, Bill Stealey, loved doing the business side of things.

Well said. There are substantial business related activities related to the product/hobby that you may not love to do.

I used to worked part-time in a ballet school. My boss and her business partner are highly trained ballet dancers. On top of teaching the classes, they do marketing, bookkeeping, dealing with difficult students/parents, hiring and cleaning in the very early days of the school. After the business took off, my boss hired administrative help so that she could take on more students.

Totally agree. I found out myself when I started a software business. It was doing well, I employed a number of people, we were making nice profits, but I decided to shut it down. Because it was destroying my joy of developing software.

The first half of the article resonates with me. I didn't use to have hobbies and I used to feel like a machine just going to work, coming back, sleep, rinse and repeat. I love programming but after writing nth CRUD app in flavor of the month framework / technology, it just isn't that fulfilling anymore. I picked up couple of hobbies - teaching Sanskrit and playing guitar and my life has improved drastically. I no longer derive meaning only from work. Both hobbies are just hobbies and I do it for fun only with no intention of monetizing them. In fact, I couldn't monetize them even if I wanted to. Sanskrit is too esoteric to have any commercial value of any kind. And I truly suck at guitar. Nobody's ever gonna pay me to play guitar. But whatever I can play, gives me pleasure, so I do it. My dad asks me why I waste so much time in useless hobbies when I could be investing that time working towards next promotion and pay raise. I reply to him, they are not useless if they make me happy and content.

I'd argue, they are also improving your mental health and making your decisions better, therefore helping you climb that ladder quicker.

> My dad asks me why I waste so much time in useless hobbies when I could be investing that time working towards next promotion and pay raise

There’s something to be said about a narrow focus on “tangible” benefits. Life is meant to be… lived. Such a comment can be made by someone who lives on the assumption that they have figured out all there is to be figured out in life - so much so that they are qualified to call anything that doesn’t yield an immediately tangible benefit as a “waste”.

My hobbies play a strange role in my day job - one that would never have made sense in hindsight. They keep me content too, of course. But they also help me understand the subject matter in strange new ways (through the lens of the hobby).

> Life is meant to be… lived.

this opinion seems to be a relatively recent development as human civilization industrialized and material wealth reached more and more plentiful. However, it is an entitlement that not everyone equally has.

Life is not meant to be anything, but survival. The fact that there's the idea that you can enjoy life, is a huge sign of privilege. Of course, one should chase it, but don't believe for a minute that anyone is entitled to it.

Well, it was definitely present in the USA in 1911:

> "Bread and Roses" is a political slogan as well as the name of an associated poem and song. It originated from a speech given by American women's suffrage activist Helen Todd; a line in that speech about "bread for all, and roses too"

> What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist – the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art. You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a right to have also. The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Bread_and_Roses

Or in the 1930s when Keynes was speculating that advances in productivity and machinery would reduce the work week to 15 hours:

https://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we...

Or on 1906 in Our Riches on Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgrpwwN8zM0

So that covers the begining of the 1900s on the USA, England, and Russia.

Other more direct examples would Paul Lafrague's 1883 The Right to be Lazy or the 8-hour campaign that got us the shorter 8-hour work day we have today. ( https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Eight-hour_day )

Truly enjoyed learning about "bread and roses", thank you.

My curiosity led me to the following:

The Right To Be Lazy by Paul Lafargue - https://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/ch01.htm

I did mention Paul Lafague's The Right to be Lazy at the end of the comment you replied to though. ;)

How do you prevent that from slipping down to the nadir (imo) of “nobody is entitled to survival”? Or is that also a part of your belief system..? (Not meaning to judge)

I'm not the OP, but that is part of my belief system. It may seem ridiculous, but I'd be happy to discuss.

>How do you prevent that from slipping down to the nadir (imo) of “nobody is entitled to survival”?

Simple; the reality of my "Existence" gives me the right to Survive using any and all means.

Here is a passage between Hump and Wolf Larsen from Jack London's The Sea-Wolf.

[Hump] “What do you believe, then?” I countered.

[Wolf Larsen] “I believe that life is a mess,” he answered promptly. “It is like yeast, a ferment, a thing that moves and may move for a minute, an hour, a year, or a hundred years, but that in the end will cease to move. The big eat the little that they may continue to move, the strong eat the weak that they may retain their strength. The lucky eat the most and move the longest, that is all. What do you make of those things?”

...

[Wolf Larsen] Again, what’s it all about? Why have I kept you here?—”

[Hump] “Because you are stronger,” I managed to blurt out.

“But why stronger?” he went on at once with his perpetual queries. “Because I am a bigger bit of the ferment than you? Don’t you see? Don’t you see?”

“But the hopelessness of it,” I protested.

“I agree with you,” he answered. “Then why move at all, since moving is living? Without moving and being part of the yeast there would be no hopelessness. But,—and there it is,—we want to live and move, though we have no reason to, because it happens that it is the nature of life to live and move, to want to live and move. If it were not for this, life would be dead. It is because of this life that is in you that you dream of your immortality. The life that is in you is alive and wants to go on being alive for ever. Bah! An eternity of piggishness!”

> the reality of my "Existence" gives me the right to Survive using any and all means.

According to what system of law? Enforced by what level of violence? You might declare certain things to be “your rights”. But without a big stick to defend those rights they are nothing but useful thinking.

I thought the listed passage from The Sea-Wolf made my point clear. Here is the key point again;

But,—and there it is,—we want to live and move, though we have no reason to, because it happens that it is the nature of life to live and move, to want to live and move. If it were not for this, life would be dead. It is because of this life that is in you that you dream of your immortality. The life that is in you is alive and wants to go on being alive for ever.

"Natural Law" gives me the right for Survival. The Theory of Evolution/Survival of the Fittest lays out the environment/circumstances which control/modulate this but the instinct to Survive is inborn in all living organisms.

Another passage from The Sea-Wolf which drives home the point;

[Hump] “God made you well,” I said.

[Wolf Larsen] “Did he?” he answered. “I have often thought so myself, and wondered why.”

“Purpose—” I began.

“Utility,” he interrupted. “This body was made for use. These muscles were made to grip, and tear, and destroy living things that get between me and life. But have you thought of the other living things? They, too, have muscles, of one kind and another, made to grip, and tear, and destroy; and when they come between me and life, I out-grip them, out-tear them, out-destroy them. Purpose does not explain that. Utility does.”

“It is not beautiful,” I protested.

“Life isn’t, you mean,” he smiled. “Yet you say I was made well.

...

“Stability, equilibrium,” he said, relaxing on the instant and sinking his body back into repose. “Feet with which to clutch the ground, legs to stand on and to help withstand, while with arms and hands, teeth and nails, I struggle to kill and to be not killed. Purpose? Utility is the better word.”

In essence, you're deriving an "ought" from an "is" [1]. I'm not convinced that the presence of an inborn instinct X justifies a "right to X".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is–ought_problem

Not quite. The "is-ought" problem has to do with deriving "moral oughts" from "factual is'" which is quite rightly untenable (independent of any specific worldview).

The instinct to Survive has nothing whatsoever to do Morality/Ethics; it is a biological imperative.

No laws of physics gives you the right to survival. You will survive if you have the physical ability to do so in a given environment. And you won’t if you don’t. Anything else is self-delusional. You can claim whatever rights you want until somebody sticks a gun in your mouth.

I am not sure what is so difficult to understand in what i have written but, let me try restating it;

The Instinct to Survive is inborn and every living organism exercises it as a "Law of Nature", but whether and how it will actually Survive is modulated by The Theory of Evolution/Survival of the Fittest. They are two different things. That instinct is what makes an organism do anything and everything to try and survive to pass on its genes.

That has nothing to do with your original “I have a right to survive”. You have no such right. You either survive or you don’t. That’s it. “Rights” are a human construct that only exists if you have the power to enforce it.

You are still not getting it, the phrase i used was;

>the reality of my "Existence" gives me the right to Survive using any and all means.

I am born -> I Exist -> Existence gives me the birth right to use any and all means to try and survive.

I absolutely get your point. I just disagree. And you are not getting my point: “Birth rights” doesn’t exist. It is all in your head. You might use the idea of “rights” to justify to yourself what you are doing. Others will use other made up justifications (gods, ideologies, skin colour, race etc.) But it is a made up human idea. Lions doesn’t need to appeal to its “birth right” to kill you. Evolution doesn’t care about your “birth rights”. You either survive or you don’t. That’s it.

>Life is not meant to be anything, but survival. The fact that there's the idea that you can enjoy life, is a huge sign of privilege. Of course, one should chase it, but don't believe for a minute that anyone is entitled to it.

Well said and you are absolutely right! I will argue even more strongly that those whose privilege allows them to even think in these terms have no idea of what "reality" is. Reminds me of a passage in Jack London's The Sea-Wolf between Hump and Wolf Larsen.

[Wolf Larsen] “What do you do for a living?”

[Hump] I confess I had never had such a question asked me before, nor had I ever canvassed it. I was quite taken aback, and before I could find myself had sillily stammered, “I—I am a gentleman.”

His lip curled in a swift sneer.

“I have worked, I do work,” I cried impetuously, as though he were my judge and I required vindication, and at the same time very much aware of my arrant idiocy in discussing the subject at all.

“For your living?”

There was something so imperative and masterful about him that I was quite beside myself—“rattled,” as Furuseth would have termed it, like a quaking child before a stern school-master.

“Who feeds you?” was his next question.

“I have an income,” I answered stoutly, and could have bitten my tongue the next instant. “All of which, you will pardon my observing, has nothing whatsoever to do with what I wish to see you about.”

But he disregarded my protest.

“Who earned it? Eh? I thought so. Your father. You stand on dead men’s legs. You’ve never had any of your own. You couldn’t walk alone between two sunrises and hustle the meat for your belly for three meals. Let me see your hand.”

...

Wolf Larsen dropped my hand with a flirt of disdain.

“Dead men’s hands have kept it soft. Good for little else than dish-washing and scullion work.”

I grew up poor and we lived in a lower-middle economic class community. I agree that enjoying life is a privilege, and probably one that not many people can enjoy in the lower economic class.

But I did see many people eke out happiness with whatever they seemed to have. Some groups had family-wide soccer games in the evenings. There seemed to be informal leagues (no uniforms or dues). It was clear parents had just arrived from work and were spending time with children in the parks. There were almost daily BBQs, again, in public parks. Clothing/etc would clearly convey it was all on a tight budget, but wow, they were always happy!

For other groups, there seemed to be a rat race of studying.

Yet for others, the kids never saw their parents, they seemed to be taken from one after-school activity to another by nannies.

I'm not sure what was better - A, B, or C. My family was in the rate race category (b) and -- while I enjoy the "success" it brought -- i'm not sure if I've lived my life as much as others.

The kids in category C that went from swim practice to forced piano lessons to kumon to forced karate didnt seem that happy either (then or now.)

I'm not sure if there is an insight here, but i'd say: whether we're entitled to it or not -- if you have a moment to enjoy happiness in whatever way you can, do it. Why not?

Thank you. You summarised what I meant to say in such an eloquent manner. The last paragraph touched me.

I think the real historical curve is U-shaped.

Hunters and gatherers had a lot of oral culture and other art precisely because they didn't spend most of their time "working". They had more leisure time than early farmers. But, of course, hunting and gathering will only support relatively small populations, especially compared to agriculture.

Agriculture without industry was brutally demanding on the small folk, but as civilization progressed, we have reached the state when many of us have significant leisure time again.

"when many of us have significant leisure time again."

why yes, and even a convenient bottle to piss in when that person doesn't have time to get to the bathroom.

don't underestimate the amount of quasi-slavery in our modern economy.

Where I live, about 75 % of the population used to be serfs during feudal times.

While we have bad jobs until today, nowhere near 75 % of the population does them. A lot of the worst, most backbreaking and repetitive activity is now done by machines.

My ancestors who were subsistence farmers ran away into heavy industrial jobs in the 1920s because they considered life of an industrial worker easier. Subsistence farming is hell.

> this opinion seems to be a relatively recent development as human civilization industrialized and material wealth reached more and more plentiful.

"The unexamined life is not worth living" - Socrates (350BC)

Your general point on the luxury of choice stands, but I think it goes much farther back than the industrial age. It's ultimately a question on meaning which is not new.

"Gilgamesh, where are you hurrying to? You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping. As for you, Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too is the lot of man."

> The fact that there's the idea that you can enjoy life, is a huge sign of privilege

Honestly, I think it's a simple logical realization. Most people happen to be smart enough to see that life can and could be enjoyed and lived, we've long outpaced animals and survival now involves much more our self organizing then anything else.

Basically, the biggest obstacle to one enjoying life and one surviving is other people. You're absolutely entitled to take that opportunity and demand of others better.

Live free or die. Entitlement isn't just about whining, it's the inherent resistence to a society that isn't logical about giving you your fair share, and working towards the common good of our specie.

That entitlement is the will to survive, and it's the reason people want to survive, so that they can enjoy life.

And if you go looking in history, you'll see it everywhere, people fighting because they believe they deserve better and because they logically see that better is feasible.

I don't see how it's a relatively recent development, social animals have leisure time where they just play around and "live" in the same way humans do. If anything the idea that life is just survival seems to be an invented concept forced on people.

I obviously wasn't born back hundred years ago, but I have a feeling that people were raised into tougher spirits able to endure more and aim sharply at finding pleasure wherever you can in a freer mindset.

People born a hundred years ago suffered through the great depression and then got thrown into the meat grinder that we call World War II. Certainly those two events produced tough spirits, but I wouldn't wish that on anybody.

sorry I meant hundreds not just early 20th century with its peculiar mechanized violence

Oh, I understand now, thanks for clarifying.

you're welcome

That is your opinion of course but not a universal truth.

" My dad asks me why I waste so much time in useless hobbies when I could be investing that time working towards next promotion and pay raise. "

I am never sure how to think about these people. It's probably great if you can find fulfillment in work and don't need other things to happy. But not too many people are wired that way.

Not that I sympathise much with the OP's father, but like most fathers he has the best intentions. In some cultures you can't waste your youth on frivolities, it's for building wealth to enjoy later. It works for some people and there is some merit in learning to defer happiness for periods of hard work, but you can't defer it forever. There is nothing wrong with relatively intense hobbies (the guitar can be very involving) but there is a good argument that an hour a day of practise is probably enough and securing a future needs to be done too.

My dad was like this - I got plenty of feedback, mainly due to laziness in my youth. However, once I got a job, he stopped advising me on my work or hobbies. I think in his eyes, if I managed to get a job making decent money and lived independently, I was old enough to make my own decisions.

> And I truly suck at guitar.

And I do as well. Absolutely love it.

And over time I have come to suck at a lot of other things as well. Drumming I now particularly enjoy.

> didn't use to have hobbies and I used to feel like a machine just going to work, coming back, sleep, rinse and repeat

This hits home for me. The last year has been hard because I haven’t been able to do any of my usual hobbies—snowboard, travel, concerts, baseball, etc. and it’s really taken the spice out of life.

Hey. I enjoy both Sanskrit and the guitar. Would you be interested in getting in touch? I have a few questions. :)

> And I truly suck at guitar.

To quote G.K. Chesterton, "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly."

"Doing what you love" is a total new-age garbage scam, only possible because we (most of us on HN) collectively live in the wealthiest, most powerful empire the world has ever seen, and nearly all of the important work (food, defense, fuel, manufacturing, etc.) is done by lower class citizens who don't know what an API is. Sure, the management of the empire requires critically talented minds, but how many roughnecks know what C++ is, and how many executive vice presidents know how to operate an oil rig?

Don't do what you love, do something that allows you and your family (or you and your community if you're not up to the task of having a family) to build resilience, and then love your life outside of the work you do to provide for it. If that's making 200 Gs per year for 10 years slinging Javascript and then getting out of debt with the bank, do that. Don't worry so much about "loving your career", I promise you no migrant farm workers harvesting your berries love their career, and yet I doubt they wake up with internal mental crises because they haven't achieved self-actualization at work.

The downside though, if you do what you hate you’re likely going to be bad at it or hit a ceiling soon. Im not saying you should ignore the financial aspect (unless you’ve already figured that out or was handed out to you) but you should try to lean into whatever you’re best at.

We see people start in a direction and then later veer their career into a different direction and are happier and more successful. It’s probably got something to do with liking it more...

> "Doing what you love" is a total new-age garbage scam, only possible because we (most of us on HN) collectively live in the wealthiest, most powerful empire the world has ever seen

You seem to be implying that living in a wealthy, powerful society somehow invalidates the opportunities that affords.

> and nearly all of the important work (food, defense, fuel, manufacturing, etc.) is done by lower class citizens who don't know what an API is.

such work is important but it's not true that this is "nearly all of the important work". Our modern world couldn't exist without, for example, so many of the decades and centuries of developments in the various branches of mathematics and science. Think of how much of the modern world is dependent upon our understanding of Quantum Mechanics, for example.

> Don't worry so much about "loving your career", I promise you no migrant farm workers harvesting your berries love their career, and yet I doubt they wake up with internal mental crises because they haven't achieved self-actualization at work.

Some people actually do love what they do for work. All things being equal, it's better to be one of these people.

One reason you can love an area of work is because you think it is important or valuable, and contributes something meaningful to society. Whereas some forms of work don't appear to contribute much to society (and I think people tend to hate these sorts of jobs). So that is a good reason for doing what you love.

"Other people hate their job so it's ok to hate yours too, suck it."

What a stupid take. Is it so bad to want a better life? Yes, my life is _already_ better than berries pickers, but that doesn't mean my concerns and pains aren't valid. We should level up, not keep everyone down because there's always someone who is having it worse than you.

That's not at all what I got from their comment. I believe you may be constructing a strawman with your summary.

Concur- I do use a pretty harsh tone when I talk about this, but it's definitely not what I mean to say.

That's not actually what I'm trying to say, and I certainly never said anything about doing a job that you hate. Many people today seem to hold the view that they ought to find some sort of passionate self-actualizing experience from the work they do, which is an extremely limiting belief that also does a lot of mental damage to people who either a) can't get a job doing what they love b) get their dream job and realize they don't actually love it. Neither situation a) nor b) is actually a problem unless you hold a belief that if you're not doing what you love, something's wrong with your life.

Doing "what you love" ought to be a perk for the lucky, not a basic requirement for employment. People need to try to do what they're good at that others find valuable; caring whether or not you "love it" or find it "fulfilling" is a luxury. The time to expect to love life is when you are with your family and your friends, not when you're at work. Nearly anyone who thinks that a job can give a fraction of the satisfaction that raising a family or spending time in their community is in for a world of hurt. There are certainly some exceptions, but if you travel around the world to hospice centers and ask people what they regret, very few say "I wish I'd worked more".

If you can find a job you love, certainly do that, but don't hold the expectation that if you can't find a job that you love, something is wrong with your life. A tolerable job that allows you to make an impact on people close to you outside of work is perfectly acceptable, and a lot easier to find than something that you feel defines you that you're passionate about.

"I don't go to a place called fun, I go to a place called work". - Some guy's dad in an article I read

> If you can find a job you love, certainly do that, but don't hold the expectation that if you can't find a job that you love, something is wrong with your life

Thanks for clarifying, that's indeed what I didn't get from your original message

I see where you are coming from, my dad always said the same to me. However, I personally could never think like that. I could never "sling javascript for 10 years" if I didn't like doing so at some basic level. For others, they might be able to do it and compensate for it with hobbies, or delay gratification until it pays off later.

In either case, whatever you do has to put food on the table and pay the bills. You can't use "I don't like what I do" as an excuse to get out of your responsibilities. As long as you are responsible enough about that, neither path seems like garbage or scam to me. To each his own.

Clearly over time, more people are having the opportunity to marry what they like to do with what puts food on the table, and surely, that is something to be celebrated.

There is a separate (but related) debate on how you define success and how far you decide to keep slinging javascript until you say I've had enough and can devote my life to more intrinsic desires even if they don't make as much money. As a society, we need to make more people realize that is a perfectly fine tradeoff to make as long it's a responsible choice for you and your family.

Hear! Hear! :-) It really amazes me why people are not willing to acknowledge their own status in a hierarchical society. Recognizing where you stand and who you are indebted to, is the first step towards a equitable society.

If you have not already read it, i recommend Jack London's The Sea-Wolf to you (have listed some excerpts in this thread).

Self-actualization when working a job for mere survival doesn't happen because of the job, it would happen in spite of it.

Succeeding in spite of something means that something is an obstacle.

Usually, it's good sense to remove obstacles.

There's little any single person can change in this world, in reality. It's a large and complicated place and most change requires machinations much larger than an individual.

The nature of the work we do while we're alive on this planet is one of the things that humans have the real ability to change.

Modern society does require that we operate interdependently and cross-disciplinarily. We need people working in various strata and with various skillsets, but that doesn't mean one shouldn't pursue their passions.

Why would you reject what you love rather than pursue it? Money? That only makes sense when it's a matter of raw survival, and if it's a matter of raw survival then you're not on the path to self-actualization, you're on the path to cortisol-fueled live-or-die decision making.

Money's not a measure of a person. It's nothing more than a stand-in for energy transfer.

Real value and the road to self-actualization is in your experience in life, and if that is overwhelmingly negative in your day-to-day and you are continually separated from what you love then guess what kind of life you have had?

It is a good think that people now have the choice to live in ways that you don’t agree with. In the same way that you have a choice to live they way you want to even when most people disagree. It’s called Freedom by the way.

I recently had a... weird... realization.

It was that for most of my career I wasn't passionate about programming computers. I was passionate about becoming successful; obtaining a highly marketable skill, making money, and gaining the respect of my peers. Programming computers was just a tool to get me there.

Perhaps this is why I never got hung up on fads. Languages, frameworks, platforms, and even industries. It didn't matter to me. All that mattered was success.

I should also point out that I had an extremely rigid ethical compass. It feels nice to have treated people well while doing work I was proud of.

Not sure why I typed that out, but there it is.

I feel the same way, except I have poor ethics. I suspect that you must have had a supportive, life affirming upbringing, while I had the shit beaten out of me all the time by my peers.

Whatever works for you!

I hate to imagine why you’re being downvoted. This is obviously a very self aware observation, from a place of trauma. I obviously wish you future ethical discretion you can be more proud of. Recognizing your own pain is part of that. I sure hope you’ve found/are finding a safer and healthier social world that brings out the better in you.

If there is a safer and healthier social world I don’t know it. Much of what I see has only made me more cynical of society.

I can’t make it so, but you have my best wishes. This isn’t always the best place for kindness. I hope you’ll take mine as sincere.

I have horrible upbringing, almost no support and worked my self from the streets in hardcore eu country towards multiple career changes and personal transformations.

I have seen some horrible things and taken part in dubious endeavours. I have been betrayed from closest friends and family. So what?

Society is hard to understand, the rat race is never ending, everyone is in some form pathologically unstable and in search of validation.

Ethics is ultimately a personal choice.

I realized early, that I don't want to define my personality as a reflection of my childhood and upbringing. This is my way to "win in life".

I have all the excuses to be horrible and abusive, manipulative or even sadistic. But I am not. And this is not easy, but in the end of the day I define myself by my own ideas and honesty and honor are things to die for.

Be what you want to be. But know that you have a choice towards freedom. And freedom comes from inside.

I have a friend who I thought had it worse than me in "human" things: his family was definitely way better than mine, but mother and dad were very distant, and not the nicest people I knew. So I used to forgive him a lot of stuff because I thought that over time he would be more "humane" because his friends understand him, etc.

For example, he took loans from most of my friends and used that money to sometimes repay each one of them to hide the fact that he owed so much money. He still didn't repay most of them .

So in the end, I found myself at this thought: I have an alcoholic extended family on top of my dad being a drinker, loads of my own internal hate towards the society because of being poor and less fortunate (which I almost never externalised), sadness due to seeing so many people around me deserving so much better and never making it due to how poor they were; yet I never thought that doing those things my friend did would be a proud thing to do.

So in the end I realised it's the choices that you make. Maybe a truly simple idea, but the choices very much define you.

Wow, I resonate with you.

For me, I have always chased success. For me, success was choosing the next endeavor with a well defined goal, doing the work to achieve said goal and finally getting recognition for it from peers and managers.

This caused me to be razor focused and always choose the most productive tool in my skillset to get things "done".

Which means that devs who focus on nitpicks annoy me. Managers that pay attention to fads and bullshit metrics annoy me.

I have a very strong moral and ethical compass. Sticking to my compass gives me energy. I feel proud of my work, my creation and take pleasure in seeing people use it.

But I won't try a new fad just for resume padding

I must admit that two people in a row praising strength of their own ethical compasses makes me wonder.

Don't you realize that this judgment is best left to the outsiders? Humans are notoriously prone to misjudging themselves. We have all kinds of biases that allow us to see ourselves other than we really are.

I for one have never met a moral/ethical person who would brag about their own moral strengths like that.

There's nothing wrong with unashamedly chasing success, but it tends to result in a certain mindset and personality. Not surprising to see a lot of those here on HN.

I like this observation.

To clarify, I was merely trying to point out that I had a rigid system of personal beliefs guiding me. My desire for success wouldn't override them. Whether or not these beliefs are good or bad -- that's for other people to decide.

I truly believe that having a "code" is essential for anyone who's chasing success/money/etc.

The downside of that is that judgement by outsiders can only be based on what is visible; the only person who knows you're still sticking to those values when there's no one to see it is yourself.

Additionally, of course you can echo outside judgement. I know a number of people who I'd consider particularly ethical, and they know I do.

No your actions show your morals. When members of a Church molest children and protect priests that do, it speaks loud and clear about their internal morals.

Sure, what I'm saying is that other people don't necessarily observe your actions. If someone molests children without anyone around to see, even if others would call them moral, that judgement would still be invalid, in my view.

> Don't you realize that this judgment is best left to the outsiders? Humans are notoriously prone to misjudging themselves. We have all kinds of biases that allow us to see ourselves other than we really are.

This is a good question. How do I know if my judgement and ethical compass is really better?

Over time, I developed two scales to measure this.

1. Does my ethical standard get work done? Does it lift all boats? Does it inspire a majority of people? Do these inspired people feel safe to speak up? If yes, I know I'm navigating something right.

2. Do the majority of equal-level peers (not my reports) approve of my decision-making? Are they happy about working with me? Do they feel like if they work with me, they will see success themselves? Do they feel safe to verbalize this? If yes, I know I'm on the right path

3. Do the vast majority of managers recognize what I am doing? Are they able to distinguish my style from others and are able to appreciate the outcome? If yes, I'm on the right path.

The ethical compass didn't just come by reading books. It came from constantly trying to do good, constantly trying to be reasonable and constantly pivoting when I sense I'm going astray. It took me 15 years to do this.

An example of a case where my ethical compass saved me - recently, my own manager tried to roadblock my growth to the next level. I couldn't tell why. In my mind, a manager would want their reports to grow to their full potential. This manager tried to string me along, stole credit behind my back. He gave me bullshit answers to why I am not at the next level. Me countering didn't appear to work because in his narcissitic world, all the work doesn't count. It hurt me but I had my ethical compass to rely on.

So, I first validated my work, approach to work and thoughts with peers. I collected evidence of my work and talked with skip. He was aligned with my thought process and happy with my work.

Since I now had validation that I was not doing the wrong things, I spent 3 months collecting evidence against the manager, by documenting his lies and his credit-steals.

Showed this to the skip. He didn't like what the manager was doing. Ultimately the manager had to quit because his lies were exposed.

I learned something from this episode. I validated my ethical compass. I tweaked the ethical compass a bit with my learnings on how to tackle self-serving assholes.

Most importantly, I am left feeling very satisfied and comfortable, knowing that my ethical compass continues to help me get ahead.

I know this might be annoying, but razor focused... is a really ridiculous picture

I was imagining someone trying to focus a binocular with a razor... not really smart :)

What led you to this realization? I've been goals focused since high school. I've hit some of my goals and not hit other of my goals but after years of this living in that mindset I realized it wasnt that healthy. I was always looking forward to achieving some future goal and when I did/didnt hit it then I spent time kind of wondering through life until I found another meaningful goal.

I still have goals but now they are not focused on specific things but rather building skills/doing things that bring me happiness. It seems to be a little more sustainable.

For me: Turning my hobby into a business made me hate it :(

I loved writing fiction- novels, short stories, interactive fiction. At first, I would just self publish them on Amazon, no care whether anyone bought them.

Then I joined a few writer groups, and they were all like "You need to market your work".

And so I spent hours every week building my email list, running ads, asking for reviews (as you need them to sell books), blogs/podcasts.

And pretty soon, started hating it all. Quit 2 years ago, after 7 years of writing.

Have tried to restart many times, but each time, quit.

My advice is: If you love someone, do it for love, dont always try to make money from it.

Yeah, not a popular opinion; as soon as you show anything to people (your books, pottery, calligraphy ) the first question is "This is good, why dont you make money from it?"

As if the only value anything has is by how much dollars it makes. It doesnt help with all these online "gurus" who claim you can make the big $$$ by selling anything (yes sir, ANYTHING!) online, if only you buy their expensive course. (and yes, I bought the course. And no, it did f*ck all)

Sorry if a bit cynical. Hope there was a happy ending to this story....

Can't you just ignore people telling you what you 'need to do'? (Or don't even go to such meet-ups, if people there are trying to make a business out of it and you know that's not what you want?) Just go back to writing for fun?

Yes, I have thought about it. But it has been 2+ years, hard to get into the habit again.

I tried a few times, but ended each time staring at the scren thinking "What the hell, this shit wont work out".

I guess Im suffering from some sort of writing ptsd :)

Hey. Just want to say that if you enjoyed writing you should try again. Forget writing for anyone else. Write for you. Like no one else will read it. Even if its only a little bit. You enjoy it. I wish more people made things they didnt try to sell. It's for you. There is nothing wrong with that.

Thanks for the kind words, yes, I'll try it

On one hand, you think: your work is good/great. You put so much effort into creating the product, why not promote it? It's unlikely to get any traction if you don't promote it. Doing zero promotion seems like a disservice to all the work you did in creating the art.

But then on the other hand, as you demonstrate, the more work you do promoting in relation to creating, the more chance you'll start to resent creating.

There's also the heartbreak of realizing that maybe your work isn't good enough, or at least appealing to a large enough audience. I make music and I'm struggling with this now. I've learned how to do promotion and have gotten some traction but it doesn't feel like enough and doesn't feel like it's catching on enough.

It's much easier for self-doubt to creep in when you put yourself out there then when you do zero self-promotion and allow yourself the self-delusion that you are great and the only reason nobody knows it is because the world sucks.

>> maybe your work isn't good enough, or at least appealing to a large enough audience.

That is very true. In my case, I found the type of fiction that sells is in a few mainstream genres, and in series (so you write a dozen books, all with a hard boiled detective, for example). Thats why every book nowadays is in a series, because publishers (traditional and indie)have figured out this is the "formula" to success.

I like to experiment and play-- one thing I didnt mention in the oriignal comment, a big reason that caused me to burnout-- writing for the "market", or trying to write in a way that appeals to the mainstream, or at least a large number of people. Forcing yourself to write a book in a way that would appeal to many people-- while you can do it short term, over long term, I began to hate what I was doing and one day, I just couldnt type anymore.

It all comes back to doing it for the love, and accepting that perhaps this will always remain a hobby.

When a programming project starts to become this endless chore that I progressively look less forward to the more I work on it, that's when I know it's time to take a step back and ask myself why I am even doing this in the first place.

Am I making this app just so I can try to make money on it, for something to put on my resume? Or am I doing it as a nice way to spend my evening? What's the point of free time if you don't enjoy it?

Not every project needs to be some kind of profitable SaaS or wildly popular open source tool. It's fun to research and experiment and take a step back every once in a while and ask yourself why you're even doing this.

Once it turns into a business, sure that can be fun, but you have to ask yourself -- do I even look forward to this? Is this even enjoyable? This is my free time, after all.

I write code for both work and for fun. It's important for me to like my job. I don't want to spend most of my waking life toiling away at something I don't at least like to do. I also want to like my creative pursuits in my free time. If you don't enjoy doing something, why do it at all? Especially when you have the choice to do other, more enjoyable things.

The weed work is the most painful though. We get through it at work because we have to. But for any personal hobby projects, I feel nails scraping blackboard level of frustration when some build issue or other trivial minutiae come up.

I won a very prestigious award for directing animation, which up until then had been a hobby. I rose so fast up to that point that I never learned how to animate to a production standard.

On top of that, to get the show into production I had to work crazy hours for two years solid. I burned out, didn't know how to capitalise on the award, and decided to go back to entry level jobs, ostensibly to learn my craft but really I couldn't handle the pressure of the sudden acclaim. I was in a very small industry full of technically more accomplished peers and there was no room for my punky attitude towards doing things the established way. My confidence and career took a huge nosedive, and the enthusiasm was knocked out of me completely.

I've managed to gain back my enthusiasm for animation but only after doing a lot of soul-searching over what I love about it and keeping that sort of stuff strictly out of hours, not expecting it to be involved in my bread-and-butter work. I still animate for fun but had to establish a very hard boundary and let go of my ideals about loving the job.

I am not doing what I love. I stopped painting because of commercial success and never ending pressure to exceed expectations. I stopped painting because I decided that I paint only for myself. Period.

I am interested in design and code. I like the feeling and the process of building something useful first, and beautiful after. I like my work. I don't need to be in love with it. I like being payed for delivering results. There is no need in my view of romance and emotion towards ones work. Craftsmanship comes from emotional balance and discipline. There are thousand things and experiences reserved for love. Love your children. Love your life. Love life itself. Make art for the sake of it. For the joy of creating something driven from inside. Like a kid who can enjoy meaningless wandering and play happily hour after hour. It is liberating and therapeutic.

Assuming you’re talking about painting on some canvas as art, do you have a link to your work?

I am talking about Alla Prima and Glazing/Underpainting/Imprimatura on canvas with oils. Old school boring stuff.:)

I have link but if I share it I will blow away my anonymity here completely. And I like being a little bit anonymous.

I share my opinions and life learnings, there is no need for validation from my side of the fence. But thank you, for your interest in my work.

Few people have the luxury of doing what they love.

I used to love programming. But now, I love germinating interesting seeds more. Getting my hands into the soil. Recently I bought some potting soil from a store and put my hand it it -- wow! It was so soft and pure and beautiful.

But I can't do that for a living, maybe not now, maybe when I retire from coding and saved up enough money to live the rest of my life.

I'd like try germinating, do you know a good guide for this? What kind of equipment do you need? Can you grow an apple tree at home?

Someone can correct me if I am wrong, but I believe all apple trees (that are editable) are grown from scions. Which is a graft of the variety of apple you want onto a root stock. I've grown a few of them in pots and transferred them to the soil.

You csn grow apples (and all other fruit) that are edible from seeds. It’s just that the quality is not as consistent as cloning.

Ahhh I just follow YouTube and blog posts.

Actually universities that specialize in farming and agriculture have some of the best resources on cloning, germinating and farming you could imagine.

A few professors even have YouTube channels too. Awesome shit out there.

There is a quote that I think about a lot - I think it goes...

"Aren't we lucky that we get to do something we used to love for a living?" - I think it was Colin Quinn talking about standup but I can't find it anywhere.

I find myself drifting back and forth between loving every second of working in technology and hating every second immensely, but overall, the positives outweigh the negatives, I still love everyday I get to learn something new.

Great quote. Almost everything gets old eventually. All of the things I really loved in the past got stale after a few months or a handful of years. Some I still do but lots I dropped.

At least with coding you can move to other areas of engineers that keeps things interesting.

Living abroad and/or spending time in the "developing" world can and probably will change your perspective on work and happiness.

From my experience abroad, I've come to realize:

1. Learning to appreciate and be content with what you do is usually a lot easier than "doing what you love" and getting paid for it.

2. People in the first world invest way too much time and emotional energy in this subject. If you don't elevate work into something that is expected to fulfill not just your need for money/sustenance but your desire for fame, fortune, happiness, etc., and you instead just treat it as one of life's daily activities, it doesn't become a monster that can consume you.

All of this is very much IMO: Work sucks. The happiest at work I've ever been is working with people I like, almost (but not quite) regardless of the work. Sometimes I get to do interesting and fun projects, but it's a lot of annoying meetings and stupid bugs and projects I don't give a shit about. I'm grateful for my gig, don't get me wrong, but I have to remind myself that I'm not living for this. In a perfect world I'd be living in a small community of family and friends and working in ways that directly support and aid them.

Just to add a counter point: I have enjoyed most jobs I have had. But I also realise that I have been quite lucky. There seems to be a lot of dysfunctional, soul destroying companies out there.

I sort of disagree that a hobby can’t be doing the same thing over and over. I know because it sure is for me. I was diagnosed with ADHD around 36 when I had my first child and simultaneously was getting in to higher management, never before realising that my coping-mechanism had been going to be early. I mean, I knew it was a stress coping mechanism, but I only had to do it in really intense weeks, which was maybe 6-10 times a year, so it was just part of life.

Anyway, having a child destroyed that as well as my need for solitude to re-energise (another thing I wasn’t too aware or). Long story short I ended up with a diagnosis and a suggestion that I found myself a hobby, much like the author. I picked Blood Bowl which is Warhammer American football, and as such is a miniature hobby where you buy and glue together and then paint little plastic dolls.

One of the things I enjoy the most is actually putting the miniatures together, and while I do kitbash (creativity) some of them, the real mindfulness comes from the cleaning, the preparing and the painting the same red on 16 figures.

Years later I know that this is exactly why I mostly stopped programming professionally and got into management. I actually really enjoy programming, even if it’s the same stupid for loop over and over, what I don’t enjoy is co-operating with project managers and clients, constantly making creative changes rather than just implementing something. That sort of programming burned me out and that eventually pushes me into architecture and later when my bosses saw potential in me into management.

I can see how taking commissions for clay cups would be similar to that. But I don’t think that always making cups would not make it a hobby just because there is less creativity in it.

It's surprising that the kinds of interactions you have in management is less chaotic and demanding than dealing with customers and project management. The highest stressors in my experience are the constant demands on your time, budgeting and evaluations.

I think different people are stressed by different things. For me it’s having to juggle the demand of multiple people who have no clue what I do.

I guess some people will find a similar challenge on management, but the difference is that I’m in charge of it now and through that has the capacity to say no or delegate. I’m sure excellent programming managers set up environments that aren’t as taxing as the ones I’ve worked in, but I’m not sure I’m even succeeding in it.

My current job is what I love. But I have to describe it to people this way:

You love ice cream, right? Now eat an 18-wheeler full of ice cream every day. That's what "doing what you love" for a career is like.

I think there is a lack of research here because so few people do "what they love" for a living. The downsides haven't been qualified; everyone assumes there are none since so few people have the luxury.

"Find a way to do what you love for a living, and you'll never relax a day in your life because your passion now feels like work."

I still love programming, and engineering and tinkering in general.

It does not mean I always love what I do for money. Not all programming is the same, like, well, not all music is the same. The particular kind you exercise very much matters.

So I do tiny side projects I enjoy, stuff like home automation, tiny utilities to simplify chores, web pages, tiny games. It's still enjoyable.

If I did not have to work for money, I won't quit programming.

On the other hand, balancing the likeability of a job (which formally is in your "also a hobby" field) and the money it brings is a delicate act. Usually they are inversely related: the high compensation, well, compensates for the tiring job. But, unless you live alone and have no other aspirations, you got to bring home more, to keep the family up.

Going to the extreme end of high pay and low satisfaction brings in burnout and depression, ultimately limiting the length and utility of such stints. Going to the extreme end of satisfaction despite low / no pay may leave you broke.

That’s basically my experience. Being a professional glassblower gave me enough time on the torch to grow my skills, but changed everything about my relationship with blowing glass. I’ve avoided playing music professionally for that reason. I don’t want my creativity to be impacted by commercial concerns. I want music to stay fun and pure.

This resonates with me. I've been developing web sites since the late 90s. It was a passion/hobby of mine at the time. I monitized my hobby as a career in 2004. Since then I've come across many new hobbies. Woodworking has been my favorite. I've learned like any professional athlete that the more practice you put in the better you get. With that metaphor in mind this is something I'm trying to distill this into my children. My children are young now so it goes no further than the more you do something the better you get. They try a wide range of things understanding that they will get better with time. I don't push them on anything. I'm happy at the moment if it's just trying to get better playing Mario. Anything I can use with them to look back on as proof that putting in time will show progress. I hope to use this mentality in the future when acedemics matter.

I believe there's an important distinction between doing what you love and doing something with love. I also believe that overall happiness is more linked to the latter than to the former. You may love coding but if you don't try to approach your daily tasks with an open heart, you may end up hating your day anyway.

Nice article, but I can't decide if the person is happy or unhappy about the decision to turn the hobby into a job. The moment when she started doing commissioned work felt like a bad idea, but she seems to be managing it. That's the worse part of skilled work to me -- having to do ideas of other people, as if you're just a tool.

This mug is green and yellow because that's what I like. No, I can't make it blue.

One thing that stands out to me is that the author has been selling herself -- her core self -- for a very long time, perhaps her entire career. She tells us this from the very start, explaining that cooking can't be her hobby any more now that it's her job. Now the new hobby is her job! I think this is a reflection of the professional pressures placed on writers trying to make a living online. Confessional writing requires sharing some sort of personal journey of growth, but it also requires building networks of people interested in you. Why are her Instagram followers ready to buy the things she makes? Why does selling seem like such a natural choice? Who wants to start an informal business? Why make it formal? Because she's already created a business platform, and that is her life. She tries to elevate her experience by fitting her experience in a broader narrative about the role of hobbies, but this rings hollow because the hobby itself is not her problem (also, note that the second pair of Gelber quotations contradict each other - hobbies are both a call to the pre-industrial, and bringing the factory into the home). The true subtext is that she's always sold herself and the monetization of her hobby was almost inevitable because of the mental habits she has cultivated throughout her life. Yes she's jealous of the artist RC, but to the author "do your own thing" is just another imperative to cultivate for a more marketable self.

Why am I engaging with this article at all? Well, we all have to mold ourselves to the environments around us. I've consciously avoided monetizing my hobbies, but I've made immense efforts to cultivate a self that functions effectively in my profession. Is that a sacrifice? I'm not sure how to think about it. I wish the author would speak to what seems to me the real story here. It's not that her hobby has turned into a job through some universal process, but that she has turned her life into her work and the two cannot be separated.

Now that I'm making money and am 'successful' doing what I love, I have realized that nothing could have prepared me for the contradictory reality of the making a living off of something that is deeply personal/inward directed.

Even if I find myself holding together what often feels like two antithetical parts, the rewards (for now) of being able to pursue the fulfillment of my 'life activity' and what I am naturally oriented towards outweigh the dissonance.

However, a pitfall is if your life activity is altered so much by capital that its creative function ceases to exist except to generate more capital; perpetuate its system - the best outcome is where capital accelerates your 'life's activity' transformative potential instead of neutralizing it.

My personal solution is to turn my back on a lot of the expectations and niceties of my work and instead focus most of my energy on creation.

*edited for grammar

I see so many fellow digital artists (webcomic creators especially, minority ones doubly so) fall into this trap especially with patreon and who visibly resent the pressure but find it very hard to get out of the monetization loop.

I wrote a little more about my experiences here, if anyone's interested from a creative side: "Carceral Content Creation" https://walonvaus.dreamwidth.org/128334.html (also valuable context: I used to create a published webcomic but left that world for reasons that become obvious in the blog post.)

A big part of the issue is that we romanticize on the idea of making money while doing something we love. But like all fantasies, reality is always more disappointing due to the nature of human tendencies.

Not that long ago I had to deal with anxieties and finding hobby was remedium for that. But it was not perfect, because thoughts about its meaningless become stronger and stronger. Then I found out that there is really important to find some audience which can boost up your productivity and give that little spark of meaning to any thing that we do in our lifes. Reddit, HN, github were my starters (fun fact is, that I started with amigurumi knitting and deep learning side projects, simultanoeusly).

And still, making an honest living doing decent work you don't necessarily love, to support a family, is honorable and noble. Many have been beloved by their posterity for doing just that. And it is often necessary. And families are well worth it. :)

There's an interview of Robert kyosaki, a business guy, he said something like:

Young people often want to do what the love, but it's avidity. While finding a purpose is larger it involves other people. I find the general idea quite true.

In similar vein: I have come to loath the word "passion" as it relates to almost anything, but especially work. Claiming to be passionate about some aspect of life has become a red flag for me: Passion is hot-blooded and short-lived; usually an indication of immaturity and a vastly self-generated false image of the object of passion, whether that's a job, another person, a work of art or anything else.

If you're looking for a way to make your day-to-day existence meaningful, to give yourself a sense of purpose beyond the humdrum of "paying the rent", I strongly believe that passion is entirely counterproductive as a guide.

Purpose comes from your own values, suggesting that quiet, sustained contemplation is more useful as groundwork.

eta: I guess this means I'm with Kyosaki on this one. ;)

I agree with your basic point, but would add that the word "passion" has a deeper meaning that the hot-blooded, short-lived version.

Something you are truly passionate about is something you are willing to suffer a great deal for.

Passion's Latin root is passio, to suffer and endure hardship. For example, the passion of Christ.

I think a good start is to not do what you hate. If you can avoid that at least, then I think you are headed in the right direction.

Any correlation to innovation and doing what you love?

If you can make a business out of writing software, or anything you truly enjoy, then you uncomplicate it. I'm working on a SaaS to help people do exactly that, CxO Industries [1].

[1]: https://cxo.industries

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