Comment by bombcar
9 months ago
The deathbed argument is simply a rhetorical one - examine your life, determine what you really want out of it, and ask yourself the hard question if you’re doing it.
9 months ago
The deathbed argument is simply a rhetorical one - examine your life, determine what you really want out of it, and ask yourself the hard question if you’re doing it.
It’s also a useful exercise to do repeatedly throughout your life. Would I want to look back at my life and realize that I spent all of my time working on building legs for Zuck’s avatars in the metaverse or would I rather have spent more time with my son?
The whole point of the post is that building legs for Zuck's avatars might be the thing that allows you to spend what time with your son that you can. Many people work very hard for miserable salaries and they couldn't spend more time with their children if they wanted to.
This is true, but elephant in the room: many people also work long hours because they want to, because it is comforting for them.
Humans have a tendency to do whatever it is they know best, whatever is in their comfort zone. There's some people who purposefully work more than is necessary because they're "scared", so to say, of going home. Maybe they are lonely at home, or maybe they're not and their family is a source of stress.
Either way, it's a form of self-destructive behavior. If you're lonely, then delving deeper into your work is only going to make it worse. Because, ultimately, solving problems is uncomfortable. If you're always comfortable, we might interpret that as you being stagnant.
Yes, solving marital problems is uncomfortable. So is spending time with your rebellious teen. And so is going to the bar and cold-approaching people you don't know. But choosing not to dedicate time to these things doesn't make them go away, it just makes them grow behind your back. And that's how people get blindsided with divorces, for example.
Anyway, long rant, point is: lots of people willingly do the easy thing, working, to avoid the harder stuff. And they may not even realize that's why they're doing it.
These types of examples IMO show how good we have it now. The worst thing we can say about the job is that it feels meaningless. A subsistence farmer wouldn't have made the same argument about working the field. A 1900 miner wouldn't have made the same argument about getting dust lung in a mine.
We've reached a point that we can complain that our WORK doesn't provide meaning. It's an incredible luxury and we aren't when seeing that we have it.
Years ago I had a consulting gig where we ported a f2p game from iOS to Android. It was a rather tedious engagement and it was clear kids would spend their parents money on in-game crap to their parents surprise. We all felt bad about it. Meanwhile the office was kinda annoying because there was frequent fuseball and nerf battle noises. One day I looked around and realized that I was sitting in an ergonomic chair at an height-adjustable desk, drinking free water that was flown over the ocean from Italy so that I could consume it. At a similar age my grandpa fought in Stalingrad, spent time in a gulag and then became a poor subsistence farmer who worked odd jobs on the side. I was in heaven and didn't know it
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Yes I am aware that trade offs exist.
Good point. I get a sense of conflict from the author, and his reaction to 'ignore' may be due to difficulty with this hard question. He has some good points, but they don't warrant his conclusion.