Comment by ajkjk

I feel like there is another angle to this which is largely glossed over in our modern world, which is: there are at least several viable reasons to pick a job or career. One, of course, is that you need the money. Two is that you enjoy it. The third is often left out, which is the moral angle: that it's the work you want to do in the world. You can do something everyday because it feels important to you, without enjoying it, per se, as long as it's not too stressful or abusive. It's a difference sense of "enjoyment", that it gives a deep satisfaction to do, even if the minute-to-minute experience isn't fun or entertaining or anything like that.

For instance (a bad example because I haven't done it yet, but it's illustrative:) I don't really think I'd enjoy the minutiae of running a coffee shop. But I do frequently imagine that I'm eventually going to quit everything else and try to open one. Not cause I fancy myself a cafe owner, but because I'm drawn to the project of creating a certain kind of space in the world, and having control over it so that it can stay close to my vision. Some of my favorite spaces in the world were cafes that have since disappeared or lost their charm and I'd like to try to bring some of that back. I suspect that I can survive and embrace the daily work if it is part of that overall vision.

This feels like a different angle than "you can do it because you're crazy". Actually you can do it because you really want to do it, no crazy required.

But this only works, I feel, if you're truly morally motivated by the thing you're trying to do. Very hard to pull off with modern jobs: corporate jobs seem to go as far out of their way as possible to destroy any sense of fulfillment; academic jobs (I'm told) subject you to torturous competition and bureaucracy as if to drain any inspiration you had left; menial jobs treat you as disposable and you're disempowered from effecting change. Probably this trend of making work unmeaningful is one of the great tragedies of our society. It is like the only acceptable way to be is for your meaning to come from "take your money and use it to do hobbies and buy things for your family", and it's much harder for the meaning in your life to come from the work itself, because there are so many things waiting to punish you if you try to live that way. But there are still certainly ways to do it.

In my opinion it should be a major goal of society to remove as many barriers to doing meaningful work as possible. Fulfillment ought to be seen as equally important to health. (As far as I am aware nobody has any idea how to fix this at a systemic level. The... cult? ... of capitalism opposes it too strongly.)