What's wrong with doing a boring job for a lot of money and then getting all the fun elsewhere? This actually seems to be the best way to do it to me
Thankfully I quit and the new job has been great.
Thankfully I had an alternative and went back to startups. I could absolutely never accept dividing my brain like that, steeping in cognitive dissonance and just letting myself rot inside. Once you’ve felt the good life - where work is play and learning happens all day long - there’s no amount of money that can be accepted to lose that.
I want to have my cake and eat it too.
The non-boring companies I've worked for have had problems of wanting to work you at 150% of your schedule, quite often illegally. It is insanely rare that you'll get a job that keeps you busy (only) 8 hours a day constantly. Either the place is always on fire and has 12 hours of work a day, or you'll have it better managed and work will be bursty with the majority of the time under utilized. Spend that extra time being taught stuff on the company dime.
It gives you more opportunities to find that combination of work you find meaningful, coworkers you mesh with, flexibility, and decent compensation, than any other time in history I'm aware of.
It's still not easy. Just easier than in the past.
Daring to work at place that does not suck is not the worst offender to the world fairness, I think.
But there is something to be said that some people are born into situations that force them to adopt a very risk adverse posture. If you don’t have any safety net, “daring to work at a place that does not suck” takes on a different risk profile and doesn’t necessarily generalize well as a strategy.
Everyone does some level of selfish things; trying to shape work so that you find it enjoyable (and therefore likely something that others would also find enjoyable) is an acceptable form of selfishness to most.
I thought it was a good reminder to have an attitude of just seeing what needs to be done and doing it.
The former is tolerable for many, the latter usually isn’t for long
Also there is the problem of having to deal every day with "professional managers" that don't know anything about IT, but make decisions based on magic 8 ball and their career interests. Similar to illiterate politicians in many countries.
If you were comparing salaries, either your company was compensating you with extra prestige, job security, etc. or you were underpaid.
It sounds cliche but happiness is truly a state of mind. You don’t have to wait for something in the future to be happy now.
The privilege of having pixels be the most stressful part of your life... it's actually really nice to read that. Having perspective from hardship is good, and everyone will have at least some perspective at some point in their life when hardship is forced upon them. But hardship in and of itself isn't good. I'm happy it is being completely eradicated from life, at least for some of us.
I've cleaned McDonalds bathrooms, worked in a plastics factory where the chemical stench left my nose nonfunctional for weeks, hauled heavy sacks of shingles up onto a roof in 100+F degree summer temperatures.
I am utterly grateful and consider it a lucky privilege to now be typing into a computer in a climate controlled office, where my biggest stressor is a deadline.
edit: different strokes for different folks, i don't want to sound too presumptuous. For some people what i described is exactly what would bring them joy.
I grew up in poverty myself but my partner and many of my friends at bigger tech companies grew up the way I discussed earlier. Most of them were pushed through their parents' social circles into a tech career and never were wanting for money. They feel the grind inherent to being paid for your time as opposed to volunteering your time and think of it as an injustice. My partner and friends complain constantly about tech and their jobs but other than a handful who briefly worked service jobs in their teens, they have nothing to compare it to. I spent my summers as a teen moving heavy boxes/furniture, often in 100F+ hot weather, and being paid in cash (hoping to become a cabinetmaker!) barely making ends meet and I know what it's like to keep a job a job.
I left Big Tech (I had joined it as a startup and ended up staying much longer than I expected) so I understand the complaints about heavily bureaucratic jobs where most of your time is spent coordinating rather than building, and while I'm always unhappy at something or the other with my job, I know how good I have it. I do a job that I don't hate, working with generally smart people, alternating between a cushy office and my home where outside of my work I mostly just complain about minor office perks. It's fantastic.
I know I'm luckier than most humans on Earth, but still hedonistic adaptation is a thing, even if you grew up in a poor family.
Backbreaking manual labor sucks. The heat. The cold. The shit. The frost. I'll format my fucking code any way you tell me to to avoid farm life. Like I give a shit. A week in and I won't even notice. Ah Christ, the smell of cow pus ...nyaagggggh.
As for woodworking: You will get cut, there is no hope of avoiding it, and no telling how bad it's going to be. The next day, we will see how serious your woodworking gig really is. You gotta be out there, bub. Get it stitched up and keep on cranking out the pieces.
I will say: I don't necessarily like to say "lucky," or even "privileged". Luck incites tricky emotion because there's an implication with luck that you didn't deserve it. A gambler who won at the slot machine should have lost his money -- luck carries that "should have" connotation with it. Likewise, privilege carries a zero-sum connotation, because we always mean someone is privileged in relation to another, which introduces almost an adversarial tone to it.
For me, a better term is fortunate. I am fortunate that I have a job in a nice office, solving interesting puzzles all day, getting paid (relatively) a lot of money doing it. Fortune has come upon me. I work hard, although not really harder than any other reasonable person. I was born in the right zip code, to the right family, had access to an amazing education, had the stability in my life to pursue it. Fortune.
I will never look down on anyone who is fortunate. I wish most people could have fortune in their lives. If the price we pay is a few complaints that the soda machine is down today, so be it!
By saying you want to be happy, you’re already telling yourself there’s a gap between your state currently and that you wish to accomplish
“I’ll be truly happy WHEN”
When comes and goes, rarely have I heard someone say “well I said I’d be happy when this happened, it’s happened, and now I’m happy. All done”
Fully agree, it’s a state of mind.
I’d also add most people who say they want to be happy don’t seem to be looking for happiness but rather contentness, but I digress
I've heard this, but only from people who had been in an very shitty situation and then got out. Happiness is a state of mind, but misery is a set of circumstances, and the latter precludes the former unfortunately.
To the OP: When it sucks a lot, try singing. It really, really helps. Throw your head back and let it out of you on the way home.