Personally I found plenty of little things to love about otherwise horrible dead end jobs, but that wasn't really the reason to keep going back to work, I was there to get paid to live my life outside of work because the job itself was not really fun or fruitful.

I actually think this is a better message for people...

Some jobs are going to be great, others are going to suck. That doesn't really matter because for most people its what you do outside of your job that will determine your happiness. Try and find a job/career that you like but sometimes a job is just something you do for money to fund other stuff and that is perfectly ok.

Personally I find the increasing emphasis on work as a way to derive personal satisfaction troubling. It looks like a subtle trap to me. A way to convince people to forgo time with their family, hobbies, side ventures and anything else you might possibly derive happiness from in favor of just working more and trying to convince yourself that that is enough.

If you love your job then more power to you but sometimes a job is just a means to an end and that is perfectly ok. Just make sure that you are spending the rest of your time doing stuff that makes you happy. Spend time with family and friends, make something, learn something new and make sure you are using the money from your job in ways that will contribute to your long term financial well being.

Extremely well put. This entire concept has troubled me for a long time and you've really nailed it pointing out that we're increasingly advising people to get their joy in life from their work instead of the literally MILLIONS of other things they can enjoy. Thanks for that.

A counterpoint to this is that many people -- myself included -- see that we spend so much of our waking hours at a job (about 40% assuming a 40-hour week) that we want to spend that 40% doing something that makes us happy.

So it's not that work defines us or drives our satisfaction, but that work makes up a large part of our lifespan, and it seems wasteful to spend it doing something just to facilitate the happiness of the other 60%.

I don't want to strive to be happy just 60% of the time -- I want to strive to be happy 100% of the time.

But it's helped me to think about this in a different context: think about the time you spend with your spouse. How much of that time is taken up with "life's necessities" like doing laundry, dishes, prepping meals, cleaning, more cleaning, driving places, even arguing and getting hurt are all part of relationships... And all that stuff takes time and it's not a nice meal out or a walk on the beach or an impromptu dance session. There's a lot of the mundane in our most treasured relationships, and the only people who have a problem with that are teenagers.

Should work/life really be any different?

You can apply the same logic to your job. Everybody needs to earn their keep. That's a fact of life. People that already want an excuse to forgo their live for the sake of work will take it as confirmation of what they want to hear.

Not to say that what you say is wrong, just to point how it can be use it to rationalize if taking literally and/or out of context.

As a freelancer living well below my means, I have the freedom to be as busy or relaxed as I want (within certain boundaries). Unlike an employee, it is up to me to be productive, improve my skills, handle my finances... or just do nothing all day. And unlike many other freelancers who don't live well below their means (or can't, it should be said), I don't often run into the problem that I have to accept a huge workload for long periods of time so that I can pay the bills in fallow periods.

Freelancing is not for everyone, and not every freelancer is as lucky as I am. But considering that many people could reach my 'level' of income by intensely studying and practicing for a few months, I'm often frustrated by how many people around me remain stuck in full-time jobs they truly hate, especially when these are low-paying jobs.

There is great amount of space for creativity in any job, but also a lot of have-to-do-it stuff. Isn't it easier to accept this ballance in life and try to reach some perfect spot within it, rather than strive for problem-free or chores-free life? (anyway it would be boring as hell).

At the end, we are all unique. Do what feels right for you, just accept that other out there might have very different goals and drives. I am quite (a lot) happy in my current spot in life and balance I achieved, but I know a few people that would not enjoy it as much.

This is my take as well. If prompted for advice, I tell people to find satisfation outside of work. Work is a rigged game. It simply will not make you happy outside of some truly edge cases and those cases are often temporary until things change. "New boss took away the pinball table. I miss the noisy environment and need it to work!" "New boss won't take away the pinball table! Its too noisy for me to work!"

Its also concerning to make career choices at age 18-22 that will last a lifetime. Young me loved working in tech. Current me could leave it at anytime and kinda wants to. Unfortunately, our employment system isn't set for a mid-life career change, unless you want to take on serious risk and start at the bottom of yet another career mountain to climb, which you may bore of just as fast, if not faster.

My personal wish is to migrate society to accept a very young retirement age. Maybe as early as 50. With automation going where it is, I think this is probably inevitable and am happy to think my kids won't be grueling through work until 65-70 like my parents generation did.

Reminds me of that obscure Bill Murray movie "City of Ember" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkSFsbv6eUg

We (humanity) are fixing this. Never before in human history has learning the state of the art in any field been freely accessible to anyone.

The tools to create a new world have never been this cheap, and there have never been so many helpful people giving away so much knowledge.

There has never been so much money available for investment, and investment has never been this founder friendly.

There has never been a market of this size this freely reachable, if you have good ideas that are sticky and sharable.

So yes, 8/10 are right now, but we can get that number down. I think custom fabrication using all the new tools, FDM 3D printing being just the start, is a serious contender for making a huge dent in the alienated work problem.

I'm not feeling cynical, not yet. This isn't the end of the story, this is just the beginning, we are alive during the greatest renaissance humanity has ever known, how awesome can we make the world? I think we can make it pretty awesome.

Really? I'm working in Mumbai right now (outsourcing has apparently gone dyslexic, as Russel Peters said). I'll be in rural Karnataka this week, and I'm pretty sure they'd disagree that learning the state of the art in any field is freely accessible to them. And there's 65 million people in that (relatively small) Indian state.

there have never been so many helpful people giving away so much knowledge.

I definitely agree with that, which is why it's hard for people who used to make a living transmitting knowledge. Oh, and a lot of the knowledge being given away so readily includes "how to violently undermine the global capital system that made this information dissemination possible".

There has never been so much money available for investment, and investment has never been this founder friendly.

Were you working in 1998? I remember those days...

There has never been a market of this size this freely reachable, if you have good ideas that are sticky and sharable.

I'm very lucky in that I get to use my talents for low-level programming to work on water purification systems. Mumbai has 10,000 deaths per annum (yes, 10,000) from waterborne illnesses, and it's probably the most developed city in India. But this isn't a problem that needs cleverness; it just needs a whole lot of people to do a very lot of hard, low-paid work. Water in particular gets loaded into the "entrepreneur" model all the time, but it doesn't really fit. You need a lot of people to build a lot of public pipes and faucets, and you need a social contract.

Gates has been asked why he doesn't work on the global digital divide and usually just says "Maslow", and I think he's got a point.

Our privileged perspectives so often cloud our ability to relate to people not that fortunate.

I disagree with the privilege narrative that's become dominant. It's completely zero-sum, when the history of privilege is one of it's extension to more groups and bigger portions of those groups.

In the future all humans will be as privileged as the humans of the west, and much more so. I'm concerned with how we can reach that place faster. Right now I think open source hardware on the reprap model is a fertile hunting ground for game changing solutions.

But I think I am right as well in that we (humans) have never been this able to solve problems like this.

Ballon based Internet and mobile devices will let developing countries leap frog the networking model of the west.

For the problem of clean water in places without public water utilities we need open source hardware projects that design cheap and easy for ordinary people/communities to make from available materials, raw and finished.

Something like a solar still that's so cheap and easy to construct it changes the entire equation.

And I know that sounds hand wavey and politics are still important. But I believe all politics get easier when there is less scarcity, and technology can reduce scarcity. And I can't fix politics, so I'm focusing on all the power I do have to make things better.

Maybe. Maybe not.

My less "book smart" friends that learned blue-collar trades like being a welder or carpenter are much happier than the ones that found white-collar data entry and sales jobs.

They have to put up with crap like unions and graveyard shifts, but in general, they are happier because they get the satisfaction of making things.

I always bought into this mentality of trying to find a job that I really LOVED. The only thing it made me do was switch jobs frequently. I'd love for someone to convince me I'm wrong but the people who seem happiest have basically told me they get satisfaction outside of work and like their job because it enables them to do other things, not because they necessarily love whatever it is they do at their job.

I think Sam is right to say this, though. There are plenty of people holding themselves back.

I hold myself back because I would be sacrificing my family's happiness for my own, and sometimes you have to do your job and get paid until you make and/or are blessed with an opportunity to do better.

Most people are just talk though. They will do what they love if you hand them everything in a silver platter. Well the universe doesn't give a damn about you. You are just star waste.

I'm in the "do what I love even though I'm broke" category, and my background is definitely privileged. My girlfriend on the other hand grew up very poor and had to grind for 10 years before she could even start to consider doing what she loves.

What seems funnier is that even the "elite" seem to have trouble with this part, sometimes even because of their ambition and turning away many people.

So the clear goal to happiness to me is fundamentally "find people that you like and will support you and you will support them, and enjoy each others' company for the short time we do have on this planet. Inspire each other, love each other." This is regardless of whether you're a start-up founder in SF, drug addicted junkie in rural Honduras, or a housewife in Saudi Arabia.

I also disagree very much that everyone in the first world are "elites." Have you ever been to an Indian reservation in New Mexico? How about the backwoods of the Appalachians where there's still snake handler churches that hold services every Sunday at least? There's no running water in half of these places and transportation to the outside might be almost discouraged. Yet so many people will point and go "they're in the richest country in the world, they're PRIVILEGED!" and that's the same tired argument as saying that poor people in the West are "privileged" because they can afford a TV and electricity.

My point is really that your local conditions are EXTREMELY important regardless of what country you're in, period. Your social circles, your family, and even the people you hang out with online all affect you. And if you have none of these... that is rarely a recipe for happiness by anyone's definition aside from the most isolationist of worldviews.

I've seen it more and more, and it really frustrates me. In my reading it corrupts your ideas with this TED-talky, breathless, pseudo-momentousness, ruining what might otherwise be an interesting point or story. And I guess I'm surprised I'm (apparently) in the minority on this view.

There are a few things. Honestly, I see the text in the input box here, and a sentence appears multi-line, and that will corrupt my perception of how it will appear. That is one basic cause.

Edit: HN should just A/B test this. Make it much wider and see what happens. I know my response will be more robust paragraphs. But what of others?

Another is conversational writing modes are more relaxed generally, though not always. So I care a lot less, often thinking in dialog, writing same, rather than composing in a more structured way. There is a time balance component too. If I'm to participate in some dialogs where I think it makes sense, I manage that investment.

I participate in a variety of venues. If you go back through my threads here, you will find some info on advocacy, and a big part of that is how one's text will flow to readers.

(and this varies a lot!)

Clearly, readers here are more sophisticated, and I see a range of styles, and in general, more paragraphs and more appropriate paragraphs. Fair enough to question my content on that basis. I agree with you.

But, that's not often the norm.

Over time, I've entertained some meta dialog of this kind, and have found breaking things up helps for a lot of people. There is a difference between, say an article, or structured piece, and dialog / sharing kinds of writing.

On narrow devices, mobile, smaller browser windows, etc... it actually does make sense to be a lot more liberal with paragraphs, and I do. I very frequently am using such a device myself. So there is that. Where I've got a keyboard, I find myself more in line with more traditional expectations.

Finally, line breaks sometimes are good for emphasis, and that's my own style. It's not always liked. And that's OK with me. There are some times when I've had to compose a complex sentence, with some logic, if, and, or, either... and the phrases between contain enough words to warrant line breaks in the sentence itself! Some contracts and proposals I've written contain these, and some A/B testing with them was interesting!

I got a lot less questions using line breaks to segment complex information into smaller, consumable, but connected chunks. And those deals just moved too. Not as many issues. In one sense, it really does manage down the hiding of something in a wall of text, "didn't you see that?" style. I prefer that as well. And like I said, it's been productive in that context.

Having said all that. Thanks! Maybe you are not in the minority, and I sure don't want it corrupted on mere style issues.

I'll up the paragraph compliance and see how it goes here. Of course, I'm bound to go looking back through things in some lame attempt to better understand votes and style now too.

Frankly, I'm OK with not being popular, and all that. The dialog here is great. I also know my perspective is not a common one to this crowd too. Fine. My biggest frustration is often downvotes without commentary. I read absolutely great comments here, and very frequently find serious thoughts bubble up from the many discussions. Worth it.

It's OK to be wrong or challenged! We are better for it, but only when there actually is a meaningful dialog associated with all that. Otherwise, it's just all negative and rather useless.

That, of course, is written for passers by in this dialog. I really do wonder what the downvotes are for and what the other party might suggest as an alternative... That's a bit of a ramble. Thanks for just putting it out there. I much prefer it.

Getting an education doesn't mean you can cherry pick jobs.

Edit to add a saying popular in my family: "Ubi amatur non laboratur, aut si laboratur, labor amatur."

Very much agreed. In fact, I think it's far more reassuring to tell young people that the "take what you can get" world they actually experience is real, and that "we adults" aren't secretly sneering at them for failing to "do great work" or "change the world".

Most people just make a living, and that's ok.

A friend of mine once wrote something similar to your sentiments. May have been posted here in the past.

"I don’t like advice like “Do what you love and the money will follow.” Not because it isn’t true, but because it’s a monkey’s paw: it’s true under the right circumstances with the right people, and for everyone else, it’s just bad advice."

http://rachelnabors.com/2014/08/19/dont-do-what-you-love/

Most people in this country and the world do not make nearly enough money to even begin to think like this.

And even when you do care about it, there's no way you know in advance how it's gonna go on the field. A friend is actually pretty sad about his job because of the company structure and workflow even though the domain is almost spot on what he loves.

Work and fulfillment seem unrelated to me.

> And in the truest sense of "most people" I would bet that "most people take whatever work they can get, and sometimes something sticks" is probably more accurate.

I am glad you've brought up this point, but in some ways this "first world problems" narrative is itself elitist: people who are less wealthy, people who live in poor and authoritarian countries (both are sets my parents and I once belonged to) _still_ have concerns about fulfilling work, about balancing professional and/or academic success with family obligations, and suffer from rejection, feelings of inadequacy, failure to live up to expectations of others, and the like.

Even more-so, many of the tradeoffs described play into choices people have to make in regards to joining "the elite". For some, a decision to be happy/fulfilled might mean forsaking the "elite"/"privileged" status. I still remember the waning days of the dot-com boom, when my family's immigration lawyer was horrified that I chose to study CS: "but all the jobs will be outsourced", "computers will program themselves". Programming (or "tech") wasn't held in high esteem when sama and I entered college: class sizes were all times low, (for those who are in Silicon Valley) 237 was the "dot com graveyard", and $1300 for a 2-bedroom within Cupertino school district was considered outrageously high.

Nonetheless, There is an important caveat I would add to what sama says -- and I think you've been hinting it in your post -- "liking what you do for work" isn't the same as "following your passion". Factors such as skill and aptitude for the given work, opportunities for finding such work, etc... all contribute to "liking what you do". I don't know if I am misreading sama or if this is an omission in sama's essay (somehow, I believe it's the former!), but often time liking what one does, also requires building some aptitude in things one (thinks) they don't like: e.g., "I hate maths!" (extrapolated from "I dislike continuous maths the way it was taught in (US) high school, so I never approached discrete maths, linear algebra, etc...") had stopped far too many people from building an enjoyable career in a maths-heavy (but not in any way exclusively mathematical, especially as far as industry work goes) fields. Likewise, "fulfilling" isn't the same as "fun". To paraphrase a person much smarter than me that I worked for -- twice -- eating a good meal is fun, going hiking is fun, watching a movie is fun; building software (or, writing a cookbook, exploring/charting a nature preserve to create safe and sustainable hiking trails, writing a screenplay or acting in a movie, watching a movie critically for a review, etc...) is, on the other hand, fulfilling and deeply enjoyable but not necessarily "fun" (even if I'll call it "fun", as I usually do) in the exact same way.

What troubles though is the following: Most people (if not all people) know already that, eating well, sleeping well, being organised, etc. is paramount to live a good life, have a good work and so on. All of these things are more personal than anything. Why, do we still don't do these things? What is about human nature that makes us weak enough NOT to do the right thing?

We could argue it's impossible for someone to do it due to external circumstances of being less privilege; think about some of the public figures who made it? Are these people doing the impossible more privileged than you are?

Privileged? Hardly. I worked a regular job for many years while spending years of my free time and weekends to create a business where I can now choose what I work on.

Most people aren't willing to sacrifice time now to enjoy comforts later. I don't consider it privilege that I did..and neither should the many people working on startups.

Then you did not have a regular job. You had a job that paid you enough to support yourself while retaining enough free time and mental energy to pursue your startup idea. For most people, this is not the case (esp. the mental energy bit).

I guess maybe the issue is in the definition of what a "regular job" is... Over the past 15 years I've always worked at what I would call regular jobs, full-time jobs at large companies where people build careers. Many of these jobs included an on-call rotation. Until our first child came into the picture I was able to, and did, work on various other projects outside of work with the hopes of one of them making it big. None of them did but that work put me in a place where within the last couple of years I have been able to essentially pick my job and work at my desired pay. Now that our child is a bit older I've also gone back to working on smaller projects outside of my daily work schedule.

Seriously. Mental energy is impacted by a lot of things. And I've had to come up the hard way, just due to my circumstances early on.

Doing this gets harder as we age. But under 30?

It's there for an awful lot of people who want it. There is one's own drive, and there are the kinds of friends one makes and how time is used.

For the longest time, I read one tech book a month. Just needed to gain perspective. I also turned the TV off.

The amount of time this frees up is AMAZING.

Networking pays too.

And for some people, that's starting a business. For others, it's self-employment / contract work. Still others, it's taking hobbies and spinning them into skills they love to exploit.

Lots of ways to get this done. And frankly, doing it consumes 10 to 20 percent of one's free time outside of a 40 - 50 hour work week.

That's not too much time. Just turning the TV off delivers that time for a very large number of people.

There is a clear cost for some jobs too. Where those work demands punch up above 50 hours, it really does start to get tough to do other things. Sadly, we've a lot of people stitching several basic jobs together and that eats a lot of their time.

But for many, who are just working full time, it's possible to make personal investments.

And what a lot of people don't get is the compounding that comes from doing that consistently.

One hour a day spent on this kind of thing compounds better than 5 hours on Saturday does. (though it's really nice to do both!)

Simple things, like just getting up early, make a big impact. Eating healthy, managing sleep to 6 hours instead of 8.5...

What is worth what?

Many people don't see a pay off they can visualize and believe they can actualize, so it's not worth it, and so they don't do it.

Setting aside difficult circumstances, it's often that simple.

I did have a 'regular job'. Most people party, hang out with their friends, and do plenty of other things in their free time. If you have the mental energy to do any of these things (or a hobby), you have the mental energy to start a company.

I worked 50 hours a week coding. Did I always have the mental energy? Of course not. But I had the discipline to continue on..even when I didn't 'feel' like it.

"For most people, this is not the case (esp. the mental energy bit)."

Most people don't want to sacrifice their fun time. I found this to be the case when I tried to find co-founders. All liked the idea of a startup, but none wanted to sacrifice their TV, friends, or bar time. It's one of the reasons why I have a successful company today..and most don't.

Building a future generally costs us 10 to 20 percent of our "fun" time, or personal time.

So what you're telling me is that most people can't just pursue their passion as their job but instead have to work a job they certainly do not enjoy in order to fund their real passion and hopefully make it into a career. That is, if they are lucky enough that their passion is actually a viable career option.

Sounds like you're agreeing with the person you're replying to, or am I misinterpreting what you said?

But even then, your anecdote only speaks for yourself. There are many people who are indeed privileged by exceptional class or talent and who don't even need to suffer through the sacrifices that you did. Doors have been swung open for them their whole live, while others (like yourself) have to open those same doors with a crowbar, and others still (like the OP's 8/10) will never even get to see the door.

There are so many things that make your actions highly specific to your situation, and that's a privilege that you have.

Don't expect perfection, because you won't get it.