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Comment by andix | Hacker News Reader

All three activities are hobbies. Things people mostly do when they feel good. It's nothing that gives life a purpose.

In the past a lot of activities connecting different age groups was a job or job-like too. Working on a farm or a family business together. Running a household and childcare together.

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I disagree quite strongly. I derive a lot of meaning from these types of activities (in addition to family and friends of course) and zero meaning from my job. It's the narrow focus on work to the exclusion of everything else in life that is the problem - and that's what the comments above highlight.

I would suggest that it's the fact your job has no meaning to you that raises the meaning the other things have in your life. That's a good thing. When people really love their job, it lowers the meaning the other things have in their life (I won't say family, necessarily, though it can, but also things like hobbies or friends often suffer, because the job is all-encompassing).

There's only so much meaning one can feel in a life.

I take your point that there is a limit on meaningful activities one can undertake but I disagree that it's some kind of zero-sum situation. I used to find my work more meaningful and I don't think it made any other things less meaningful - I just felt that I spent more of my day doing things that meant something to me. Life, on the whole, can feel more or less meaningful; we don't distribute a fixed amount of meaning across all the things we do.

> Things people mostly do when they feel good.

This sounds like an inversion of cause and effect.

> All three activities are hobbies. [...] It's nothing that gives life a purpose.

I find this to be a dire outlook, myself.

Hustle culture. Everything has to have a purpose. Ideally commercial.

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