<story><title>What Doesn&apos;t Seem Like Work?</title><url>http://paulgraham.com/work.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stegosaurus</author><text>What if the idea of work itself is what you dislike?&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of activities I can enjoy, and some, quite a few of them in fact, are profitable.&lt;p&gt;Once you shoe-horn them into the power dynamic situation of a traditional job (with the bureaucracy that entails unless you&amp;#x27;re dealing with Actual People as opposed to corporations), suddenly a lot of the luster disappears.&lt;p&gt;As a ridiculous example - I enjoy reading. It&amp;#x27;s not really work at all, right?&lt;p&gt;Ask me to read 9am-5pm and I&amp;#x27;d start to find it frustrating. Or add in a commute, or very low pay.&lt;p&gt;The actual job itself is very rarely the issue for me. It&amp;#x27;s what you miss out on, and also the fact that it invariably involves submission, acceptance of being subordinate, etc.&lt;p&gt;edit: To be clear here; I&amp;#x27;m not talking about work ethic in the sense of &amp;#x27;pushing through something you find difficult&amp;#x27;.&lt;p&gt;More the general idea of not wanting to be a part of a machine, a construct that you don&amp;#x27;t agree with. Large corporations and their &amp;#x27;policy documents&amp;#x27;, for example. I don&amp;#x27;t want to work for a company in which my boss doesn&amp;#x27;t have the autonomy to speak to me as a human being - this stands regardless of whether my job is backbreaking labour or eating chocolate bars.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stegosaurus</author><text>As an addition to this, I&amp;#x27;ve struggled a lot with the concept of working for pay and only recently could I really begin to explain why.&lt;p&gt;Some people would probably call it &amp;#x27;entitlement&amp;#x27;, but I&amp;#x27;m not really sure that&amp;#x27;s an accurate description.&lt;p&gt;As an employee, your role is essentially a permanent state of brown nosing. First of all you must convince a rich person&amp;#x2F;company that you are worthy. Then you must convince them that you want to work for them, that they&amp;#x27;re special, and so on. And then later, you must defer, every single day. Ill? According to policy document AED, page 5, section b, one of your eight sick days will be deducted, worker drone!&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not enough to simply perform a valuable function for society. You need to be subservient and defer to authority - you are worth less than your betters (those with wealth) and must please them in order to eat, in order to shelter.&lt;p&gt;There are a few ways left in which you can directly serve other humans and profit via such - private entrepreneurial services such as window cleaning, antique dealing, etcetera - but these make up a small portion of the employment market today and are often subject to ridiculously overbearing regulation. The vast majority of &amp;#x27;jobs&amp;#x27; in the Western world involve being directly, by rank, inferior to another human being.&lt;p&gt;Other people seem much more capable of dealing with this than I do. Often I find myself resenting others for putting up with the more ridiculous aspects - it feels like a betrayal, that if only people were better human beings and less likely to defer to authority we could all have a better experience.&lt;p&gt;This is the struggle I face, really. Physical trauma I find very simple - the emotional aspect of actively taking part in a system that I despise is much more difficult.</text></comment>
<story><title>What Doesn&apos;t Seem Like Work?</title><url>http://paulgraham.com/work.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stegosaurus</author><text>What if the idea of work itself is what you dislike?&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of activities I can enjoy, and some, quite a few of them in fact, are profitable.&lt;p&gt;Once you shoe-horn them into the power dynamic situation of a traditional job (with the bureaucracy that entails unless you&amp;#x27;re dealing with Actual People as opposed to corporations), suddenly a lot of the luster disappears.&lt;p&gt;As a ridiculous example - I enjoy reading. It&amp;#x27;s not really work at all, right?&lt;p&gt;Ask me to read 9am-5pm and I&amp;#x27;d start to find it frustrating. Or add in a commute, or very low pay.&lt;p&gt;The actual job itself is very rarely the issue for me. It&amp;#x27;s what you miss out on, and also the fact that it invariably involves submission, acceptance of being subordinate, etc.&lt;p&gt;edit: To be clear here; I&amp;#x27;m not talking about work ethic in the sense of &amp;#x27;pushing through something you find difficult&amp;#x27;.&lt;p&gt;More the general idea of not wanting to be a part of a machine, a construct that you don&amp;#x27;t agree with. Large corporations and their &amp;#x27;policy documents&amp;#x27;, for example. I don&amp;#x27;t want to work for a company in which my boss doesn&amp;#x27;t have the autonomy to speak to me as a human being - this stands regardless of whether my job is backbreaking labour or eating chocolate bars.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ashark</author><text>Anytime I read one of those &amp;quot;just do what you&amp;#x27;re passionate about!&amp;quot; posts, or job postings that read like &amp;quot;we&amp;#x27;re looking for people who are &lt;i&gt;passionate&lt;/i&gt; about [thing that literally no-one has ever been &lt;i&gt;passionate&lt;/i&gt; about]&amp;quot; I try to think whether there&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;anything whatsoever&lt;/i&gt; that I&amp;#x27;d enjoy (let alone stay &lt;i&gt;passionate&lt;/i&gt; about) doing (at least) 40 hours a week, 49ish weeks a year.&lt;p&gt;I haven&amp;#x27;t thought of anything yet.&lt;p&gt;Left to my own devices, I&amp;#x27;d probably spend 100 hours one week programming, then not touch a computer for two or three weeks, reading or building something or doing stuff outdoors instead. Lock me down to 40 hours every week, even weeks when I&amp;#x27;m not in to it and would rather curl up on the couch for hours on end with some math books and a notebook or marathon-watch some Criterion movies or go camping with my family or whatever, and any fun I was having in those 40 hours will disappear fast.&lt;p&gt;It doesn&amp;#x27;t matter if the thing I&amp;#x27;m clocking in to do is &lt;i&gt;play video games of my choice and in the way that I choose&lt;/i&gt;, even—I&amp;#x27;ll be ready to not look at a video game for the next &lt;i&gt;year&lt;/i&gt; within a matter of weeks.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s not to say that I consider all work equally bad, but I&amp;#x27;m probably not going to love anything at 40+ mandatory hours every week. The only way I can imagine enjoying that many hours on the clock is by splitting it between at least two very different things, like programming 4 hours&amp;#x2F;day then carrying heavy stuff at a construction site the next 4 hours, and even that might not do it over the long haul.</text></comment>