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Comment by weinzierl | Hacker News Reader

I fully agree with you, that it is important to keep your day job separate from the rest of your life and be able to detach yourself from work.

However, I believe strongly that you can only have a happy life if you love what you do in your day job too. 9-to-5 are too many hours to be miserable and wait for end of your work day[*]. Also you spend a lot of time with your colleagues. Life is short, don't waste that time.

I'm German, by the way, and I'm not sure how well my attitude fits the cliche;-)

[*] Don't you have a nicer word for the end of your work day in English? In German it is called "Feierabend", where "Feier" comes from fire but means celebration and "abend" is evening. So we have a party evening every day. What an apt word.*

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> I believe strongly that you can only have a happy life if you love what you do in your day job

This is bad news for the huge amount of people with jobs like trash collector or grocery bagger.

I think you're making an assumption here that menial or dirty jobs are always unrewarding, but that's not my experience.

I've met many people doing the kind of jobs you describe who find it satisfying. They may love using their hands, making the world a little cleaner, helping others, or just like their coworkers. Some say they like the simplicity of a job where it's easy to tell when you did it well and you never need to take your work home with you. Some find it ennobling because of what they pay lets them do.

At the same time, I've met just as many people in theoretically "good" jobs like well-paying software engineering that are utterly miserable.

It's not the job, it's what the job means to you.

There's a huge difference between "find it satisfying" and "love what you do."

I think there's a smooth continuum between "hate what you do" and "love what you do" and "find it satisfying" is closer to the love than hate end.

No one loves their job every moment of it and even the most rewarding job has challenges, stress, and drudgery.

This falls apart when there are less jobs than individuals who would be happy in that job (extrapolated to all fields and interests), or conflicting interests appear. Realism doesn't always mesh with that ideal.

"Feier" ist not a fire, I think you mixed that up with "Feuer". Though "Feuerabend" could have a really interesting meaning if it existed.

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