You are what you love
gspanos.tech
gspanos.tech
I like my work too but when I hear things like this it's so hard not to cringe because of how much of a place of privilege this comes from. Most jobs are things no one would want to do if they didn't need to survive, and that's fundamentally built into our society and economic system. Let them eat cake though.
Someone has to empty the bins. I guess like anything emptying bins is a job you can enjoy more or less, depending on your inner attitude to doing it, and your ability to "make the best of it" (by having a laugh with mates on the job etc.) but surely it's hard to be creative in it.
There are millions of jobs like that that have to be done by someone – unless everyone, including those who enjoy that self-fulfilment in their work, somehow were to chip in and do their bit.
But yeah, harvesting as a community sounds more meaningful to workers than mass fruit production does.
Now I work in FinTech. The fulfillment is different, sometimes it's good. But I reflect on this time often. I own a small home now and my dad comes around to help me fix or remodel stuff. I'm handier now because of those experiences -- I think I do find a little more fulfillment when working with my hands. I also find myself in my garden more often which brings a little more joy than my day job. Perhaps it's just balance.
Those traditions and rituals are alive and well in small communities. Modern agriculture is based on the need to feed millions and millions of people. That’s why it is the way it is.
Meanwhile, I'm relatively very highly paid, and while I really like my job because I get to work with interesting technology and I think my coworkers are fantastic, the only reason my job exists at all is because of the extreme insanity of the US healthcare system. Literally everyone would be better off if there wasn't a reason for my job to exist in the first place.
You can see that in software orgs as well, the easiest tasks are also the most important, like ensuring the site continues to run and handling breaking changes in dependencies, those tasks has to be done or your entire product is gone. But the highest paid engineers probably don't work on those things, instead they might look at adding more features or drafting new architecture, those tasks aren't as important but they are much harder to do so are better paid in general and you require higher skilled workers.
So in general the lower paid the more important their work is, because higher skilled tasks are harder and less reliably done so we try to not rely on them getting done. Think famous painter vs low paid icon designer, which work is more important? Goes for most things.
These both completely different things balanced each other out perfectly.
Also, perhaps, the knowledge that both were temporary and meant to lead to other, or better, things.
We don't even have an economic system that pays well or treats people humanely...
While we have no idea at all of any interventions that only achieves the partial result you want.
If you really don't know, I'm not your research assistant so I won't go look up things like universal health care and the social support strategies of various European countries for you. If you're just trying to bait me into some sort of pedantic argument, I'm far past the age where I felt compelled to interact with people who think being deliberately obtuse is a valid conversation tactic. Either way, I'm going to let you finish this one yourself. Have a fantastic sunday.
It's not like that in order to suggest that something is bad there must be an existing better version. The suggestion can be about creating that better version.
That of course is a general answer to your asking for a comparison, as if lack of one would refute the point.
Some country first abolished child labour, even when all others still had it. Where the people who advocated for that misguided, since they didn't have a better example to "compare" to?
These are of course also concrete answers to your question, like many EU countries where the vacation period is one month, where there are better employee protections, where there is less discrimination, where overtime is frowned upon and the work culture is not the US "grind", where waiters don't have to make do on tipping, and so on.
They don't have to be perfect in everything either (because an easy knee jerk critique would immediately point to some other shortcomings in their work arrangements). For the point of the suggestion, it's enough that they have better aspects than some country like the US could also adopt.
People of all backgrounds will find that non-painful survival is still profoundly unfulfilling and will continue to innovate, create, work. I think the fear of succumbing to the elements in America is too real and that that fear is a massive drain on the economy and the spirit of our people.
What's interesting are the libertarian types who want the opposite. You don't get anything by default, you have to fight for everything. All I can think of is 1) why? and 2) is that really their vision of the future? Like in 100 years we'll still have to work meaningless jobs just to put food on our table? Is that really the future we want?
Sometimes those hierarchies are natural and essential (race, gender, age, whatever), sometimes they're contingent and constructed (skillset, grindset, 'hard work', whatever), but it always has the same end result: they think that you can categorise people like insects, and that some groups of people deserve better things than others. Naturally they believe they would not be at the bottom of the hierarchy.
You may also be interested in the term 'capitalist realism'.
Western civilization has brought more food, clean water, and rescued more people from poverty in the 20th century than the entire history of human civilization. None of that was done by offering guarantees, it was achieved through free market capitalism. Competing economic systems that offered the guarantees you’re describing not only slaughtered millions and caused mass starvation but collapsed from economic dysfunction.
I'm generally a supporter of capitalism, but I think present conditions could be improved to facilitate that competition. Workers need to be able to use public transit in peace, which means getting homeless people out. We need to be able to offer shelter so that forceful removal is justifiable. Children need unequivocal access to nutrition so that malnourishment doesn't impair their ability to compete in the arena of idea-generation and in the knowledge economy. I think if the government were in the business of offering floors on quality of life that people could spend their time more productively instead of solving the same hunter-gatherer types of problems individually over and over again. Food insecurity may have been the impetus for work in the past, but I believe that status insecurity can replace it going forward. Nobody needs to starve for the West to prosper.
Nonetheless I believe emotional drive is needed for some high skilled jobs. It doesn’t necessarily need to be passion though. It could be desperation, greedy, peer pressure - whatever keeps you going
There are aspects of all of our jobs that we all love and hate to varying degrees, but there is nothing weird or wrong about taking a job just because you need the money.
You are not defined by how “useful” you are to your job.
I've worked labor in flooring, it's definitely not a job one wouldn't want to do without pay, but there was still an element of craftsmanship which one could find joy in
I imagine most people working with a computer in a corporate role, are spending maybe a few hours of their time actually working, and the rest of their time doing things they actually enjoy doing.
In a way, that kind of enjoyment is actually more important than extrinsic rewards – it actually is your moment-to-moment life.
Which, to be fair, is what Spanos' piece is getting at too.
Not OP but most low-skill, sanitation-related jobs are most likely the best example. There certainly is craftsmanship behind cleaning but it mostly boils down to hard physical labor.
Btw this is simply not true. People worked less in agriculture than a 9-5. You’d only really be working hard at specific times of the year- harvesting, seeding, etc. You’d be doing other things like working on the house, feeding various animals, churning butter or making clothes, etc, in the in-between.
I lived such a life on my grandparents subsistence farm in early post-communist Romania, where we only bought store made bread and nothing else for months (and even that was optional, but store made bread tasted better than homemade).
I would LOVE to go back in time to that house on a summer night, 0 light pollution, starry night, just the crickets and occasional sound of the hooves of the cows or horse against the stone pavement in their yard when they went for a drink, or the dog being happy you visit him outside when you take a piss.
Or the late evening dinner on the high porch, people across the stone-wall fence returning from the fields in their horse pulled carriages overburdened with hay. Or the strong sense of community of the people gathered at their out of the gate benches smaltalking in the evening.
Or the rain-invocation rituals that involved splashing the village virgins dressed only in leaves in their late evening procession. Or the taste of milk straight after being milked out of the cow (I don't know how I never got sick), or the taste of fresh butter, or cheese or whey cheese.
Or fetching sheep milk from the herd manager over the bouncy wire bridge, starry night, accompanied by swarms of fireflies, wind whispering through the alder leaves.
Or the cows opening the iron gate with a thud in the evening when they return with the communal herd.
Or riding the horse without a saddle because my shoeless feet hurt from walking over freshly scythed grasslands.
Or returning with my grandpa late in the night from a long trip up the mountain to his lonely uncle's house. We brought him meaty treats and he showed us the squirrels in his roof attic.
Or to hear my grandparents extraordinary survival stories or stories about supranatural occurences.
Possibly different on a factory farm that maximises production every day but that’s not really what you’re referring to.
This comes from personal experience working on productive small farms.
But work is indeed seasonal, and I doubt you'd actually be able to be so effective that you don't have any free time at all. (And if you manage that, presumably you'll be a rather rich farmer...)
Also, in many places, there's nothing much to do in the winter except stay inside the house around a warm fire and try not to freeze. Yes you could take on some other work using the light from the fireplace as well... but did everyone actually exert themselves so much that they didn't have a single day of rest? I really doubt it and it's more likely it's a tale told by capitalists to scare us into being grateful for being employed.
PS: much of Europe also observed the Sabbath too, so there's also at least one day off per week.
Do those families have access to modern conveniences at all? Like any goods shipped across the world by modern shipping, just as one of thousands of examples? They do, I am sure. Imagine you lived before that, where the only stuff you would have easy access to were goods produced within a few hundred Km (but mostly you needed to produce everything yourself within your "tribes").
Most of human history had no cities, very few roads, very little commerce outside local villages. I am sure they did have a lot of free time as others mentioned... but work was just not something you did for enjoyment and I think it never really is.
This is my experience working in factories vs offices anyway. No one is fake in the factory because we don’t need to be. Office people play so many little games and politic around and pretend to be happy even when they’re not.
Despite the passion they pour into their work, they understand that once it's out there in the world, it's not theirs anymore. The moment the artist lets go of it, it belongs to the viewer, who will interpret it differently through the lens of all their personal experience. And if the thing is any good, it will be heavily analyzed and critiqued, so to stay sane the artist has to completely let go of it and focus their energy on their next creation.
If you don't actually understand it (and you don't), don't criticize it. Chesterton's Fence.
Man, you must hate your family. I can tell because you think someone else who values their job highly is privileged.
Maybe we can stop using that fucking word for everything.
there's also the problem of ending exploited since you will accept doing more for less
When push comes to shove, a bit more pay won't motivate someone as much as having a feeling about the work will.
I feel guilty because I have a passion for software development but once pushed it away because I felt it was causing me social ostracization I couldn't afford (this was long before the Web exploded and "legitimized" the software developer). While doing things that were not-software, I kept getting dropped "hints" that I was on the wrong path (there is no rational way to explain this unfortunately), so I decided to hop back in (conveniently, right when the Web was starting to take off). I've been there ever since.
My S.O. is artistic but found no way to monetize that so she now does what amounts to "admin and logistical planning work for highly-paid traders", and she hates it. She complains about it all the time, especially after every business day, and she brings much stress into our relationship as a result. I spent a while trying to encourage her to push back into creative work but it just wasn't sticking- turns out that she had an evil woman manager once who kept completely shooting down her work and I think she resolved then to never let her feelings get near work ever again. My attitude towards that situation, was I in those shoes (having grown up ostracized for what I believed in and cared about, and then later vindicated) would have been to tell that woman to EABOD and I would have tried creative work elsewhere.
I have to wonder how many people out there are just going through the motions at their jobs because of something like this. And you're absolutely right- I AM privileged... but if it was possible for this to be more common, I wouldn't be. I really wish that something like my experience would happen to everyone. Would something like UBI enable more people to find "their life's work" before they get stuck in a rut that just happens to pay the bills, I wonder? How much potential economic growth are we actually missing out on, here?
You know how when you shake a bunch of different shapes on a sieve with similarly-shaped holes, you get more falling through the sieve (i.e. finding their happier job)? And when you stop shaking, whatever shape happens to be over whatever hole is the one they rest in? What do we need to do to add more "shakeability" to the market so that more people can try more things relatively safely (financially)?
My life DOES have a lot of other drawbacks that I won't get into (which probably serve to level the overall privilege I'm experiencing), but this is not one of them.
I really do wish it on everyone.
The Protestant work ethic once contained many good things like a sense of duty, efficiency, self-discipline and so on. Emancipation of others, and helping others out of poverty was always built into that!
But under late stage capitalism it becomes disfigured and twisted.
That guilt is used against us. We make "work" into something that must be miserable by definition. And some of us even revel in that self-flagellation. We stop distinguishing between laborious chores and work as art and living. "Money and survival" eclipse all else. The abject penury of that mind-set is a sort of work in itself.
It need not be. Ten thousand years of artisan labour, craftsmanship, labours of love building cathedrals and monuments, cooking delicious meals... Half of all the work done in the world is childcare and caring for the old.
It's the power relations of capitalism that make work shitty, and we all know it. There's nothing "fundamental" about it. We are at a very unique and hopefully short moment in history where modern employers will go out of their way to fit suffering, humiliation and self-loathing into the job-description, maybe in order to feel justified for what they pay - often cynically hiding behind false notions of efficiency and necessity, security or whatever.
Some of the most miserable and fucked-up people I've ever met work in banking, advertising. and other places of "privilege".
> Half of all the work done in the world is childcare and caring for the old.
This is a really profound statement, thanks for making me think slightly differently!
youre kidding right? of course some of them were proud of their contribution.
But I wonder, factoring out the physical toil, whether future generations might look at giant technological monoliths, maybe The Internet of 2100 and say;
"Those techies were unhappy slaves. they laboured in basements and
cubicles. They wrote code just to eat! It was obscenely inhuman."
"Those who believed in the Great Singularity", devoted their lives
out of religious fervour. Many of them wrote code without being
paid, just because they had a vision. "
edit: s/Interest/Internet/g
im not arguing it they died during construction. My point is that a lot of them were undoubtedly proud of the work they produced, not even all the workers on the pyramids were slaves so thats pretty telling imo. Also i am one of those "techies" and i have been involved in projects i didnt initially have passion for, and in all cases i ended up coming around because it was something i worked on daily. Thats what im saying happened with the workers in churches/pyramids, surely some of them.
Us. Our culture.
FWIW I'll try to explain a little more. I mean, that's a great question but I think it's the wrong question, if you don't mind me saying that.
Nobody can see outside the logic of their own epoch.
Capitalism can't be "fixed", because it's just what it is. If we "fixed" it, it wouldn't be capitalism any more, it would be something else. In fact it's been many different things over the past centuries as it transforms, much as people like Smith and Marx predicted.
Most people at this point say "Okay, smarty.. so what will you replace it with?". And again, wrong question. There is no list of "systems" that could simply be plugged in as replacements. That kind of nonsense leads to great leaps into famine and 20 million starving. Politics is not software like that. At best it's a set of potential slow paths that all start at where we are now. It is not even a set of destinations, because every end point we pursue changes with the dynamics of time and change itself.
The question, as I see it, is what do we change in ourselves to make capitalism work. What makes capitalism into a non-toxic system that does not destroy our planet and lead us to perpetual cycles of war, and misery and self-hatred?
Now if you want to talk about that list... that's another conversation.
That's not the same as changing culture. That by definition must change.
You're talking about changing rules (EPA)
Are you familiar with the work of Meadows? She gives names to each of these levels and sets up a relation between them.
Here's a couple of digs into that if you're interested [0,1]
The author is not considering loving meta-skills. I don't love programming, I do love intellectual challenge. I also love learning things as fast as possible.
If I'd be a cleaner as a job, I'd teach myself how to be mindful while doing it. I'd teach myself how to be okay with the boring/mundane and utilize the job as a tech detox. If I'd be a bus driver, I'd utilize the job as a way to make my social skills better (I've seen bus drivers do that in NL) or I'd utilize the job as a way to reflect on life as I wouldn't need all the brain space for driving the bus. If I'd be a blue collar worker, I'd flip homes since my network would allow for it. I'd also do a lot of crafting on my own.
When one loves a meta-skill, many things become their passion.
I had the same realisation but never expressed it as well. I used to want to be an artist for my living. Eveventually I realised that what I really wanted was to be creative in some way. Didn't have to be art or music to earn money.
I recognize the creativity part, well put!
I have a theory that what you love is what you can experience bad versions of. If you're picky about something, you don't really like it. Connoisseurs and fanatics aren't picky, they're voracious.
If you can only drink the very best wines, you don't like wine. I can eat very very bad, even stinky Chinese food, because I love all versions of it.
I can tolerate bad books much more than bad movies. I can't stand a bad movie, it makes me upset and impatient: I don't really like movies. People who do, watch everything they can, the good and the bad alike. Etc.
If you truly don't know what you love, see if you can get interested in bad instances of things; if you like something when it's bad, you'll love the good version of it.
Maybe the best way to kill something you love is to make it into work in the first place. There's a good argument for keeping the things you really savour a little at arms-length.
One psychological idea I found immensely helpful but hard to digest is the relation between love and hate; Love and hate are not opposites, but proximate. Love can easily flip to hate and vice versa. They're from a vector of two circuits, arousal and pleasure/displeasure. The opposite of love (and hate) is indifference. Socially, we worry about "hate speech" when a much more dangerous state of mind is blank faced indifference. ( Most of what I'm saying is just Erich Fromm [0]).
Hi, I’m a Chinese person. WTF do you mean by this? Are you seriously saying you love Chinese food (also what do you mean, Chinese food? What provinces? What regions?) when it’s shit? You’ll happily eat stale bao, rotten meat dumplings, moldy rice? What is “stinky”: durian? Something else?
I love programming and computer science and everything around it. I love learning about it in my free time and creating programs that serve no other purpose than entertainment (for myself).
I couldn’t care less about the e-commerce software my boss pays me to maintain/fix/add features. I do it because it pays the bills. God, I hate daily stand ups.
>> Emotion cannot be separate from work. It has to be a part of it. When working, you’re expressing yourself. You express beliefs, opinions, and strategies, world views. You cannot detach yourself completely from work. I doubt that you ever should.
because 2 days ago I had a discussion with the owner of the company I work for (and, therefore, my boss), where I told him that we are going through a bizarre moment and that one of our colleagues was in pieces when talking to me.
He asked if that affected me, and I said that obviously it does, it's a person suffering, a person I like and who delivers a lot of value to the company.
He replied saying: "Well, it shouldn't, only our family should affect us in that aspect."
Then, finally, I understood what these people really think. They use us just to achieve their goals, the whole idea of team/squad is, in the end, a big fallacy.
I don't think all bosses are like this, but the ones who express these views in critical junctures that reveal their character and world views as such, I think it's safe to say that they indeed are intellectually and developmentally blunted (of the emotional intelligence, interpersonal relationship, and leadership dynamics variety) in a manner that can cause legitimate harm to anyone under their authority and has to take orders from them.
I'm 51 and I've got a family too (9 years old kid) and my love for coding and tinkering with computers never went away. For example yesterday evening when they were asleep I spent hours playing with a (used) NUC I just bought. I did hack on some scripts too.
My hobbies are my cars and computing and I love that, since forever. And I still love these even though I've got a family.
I'd argue that something that you love and that you suddenly don't love anymore once you have kids is something you didn't really love that much.
A family and a love for the craft are definitely not mutually exclusive things.
There are many things I love but since I got a family I just don’t have time for them. Or if I have the time I realize there’s a million other things I can be doing with my family.
You have cars and coding. You spend time on those hobbies and presumably not with your family. OP just realized he’d rather spend it with his family.
My work day is 8-5 and that’s the time I have to get everything done. That’s it. I don’t take work home so I better make the best of the day.
Fun fact that I became a much better developer when I started to think like that. I dont slack around. I work 10 hours day, happy and concentrated. I see the results of my work impacting my personal life in a positive way. And the problems that I have at work, are not my problem, but companies problem. I am there to solve them, but after day is over, I just keep them at work.
I'm lucky enough to be doing what I love, but I got here by being good enough at doing what I don't love.
I consider hobby as unconditional needs for creativity, while job is condition for make a living.
"Love the reps" - Arnold Schwarzenegger
Is this not everyone? Who the fuck brings their emotions to work? I thought the whole trope of "you should love what you do" was just capitalist tripe to get people excited about the work most people were required to do to avoid homelessness (notice—society offers no right to shelter or any other meaningful protection from harm).
You are what you create