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I don't know if it is good to love your job. Anything that you do professionally has a tendency to get boring after a time. If you're working for someone else,

I don't know if it is good to love your job. Anything that you do professionally has a tendency to get boring after a time. If you're working for someone else, that also constitutes a blow to your happiness. I think finding a sustainable balance should be sought after when looking for a job. Does the job let you disconnect? Does the job feel satisfying to you? Do you like the office environment? How much does it pay? And how does this job affect your career? If you have sufficient money, you can quit at any time and find a suitable less-demanding (both physically and psychologically) job. I like to think that, I can provide value to a company. If they don't appreciate that and try to take advantage of me without compensation I am always free to look for better opportunities. Once I did an internship working crazy hours. The people I worked with also worked non-stop. A couple of them slept in the office, a guy slept in the gym. Everyone there was telling us to evaluate our options, think carefully before committing to that firm. And we were thinking that once we got in, our lives would be on hold for the next 10 years. While we were discussing this in the middle of the night another employee looked at us and said "You can quit at any time. See this job as an opportunity to learn things while making good money. Once you stop working, they take the firm cellphone away. All notifications stop. Everything will be back to normal." That talk stuck with me. Whatever the circumstances are a job is a means to make some money. You are free and nobody's slave.

welly 9y ago
How about those in the arts as a profession? I don't think they'd have a successful career if they didn't love their job. I think they'd produce pretty abysmal art.
- lmm 9y ago
  You can be a perfectly good artist as a 9-5 worker; producing good art is much more about, well, doing work, than anything else. The problem is that you're unlikely to be paid well, because you'll have to compete with all the people who are doing art for the fun of it.
- tjr 9y ago
  I've produced music for others (as a job, if you will), and I've produced music for my own enjoyment and satisfaction. While I do get an amount of enjoyment out of producing music for others, it may or may not be music that I personally like. It has to meet certain criteria. It has to sound like this, use these instruments, or be that duration, or whatever. A lot like programming, I think. I can program on my own time, making whatever I fancy, using whatever language I want, to my own maximum enjoyment. At a programming job, I will likely enjoy it to at least some degree, but I may or may not be doing everything in a way that I think best, because I'm doing the work for the satisfaction of someone else. But then, producing something for someone else, be it software or music or whatever, results in a different kind of satisfaction on my end: the satisfaction of meeting someone else's need. They wanted X, and I made X for them, and they are happy with it. I may or may not like X myself, but I am pleased that they like it!
enkid 9y ago
Given the choice, I would like to do more than just make money when something takes the majority ( or a large minority) of my time. A job can have meaning, and for me that makes it a lot was it? We to wake up in the morning.
collyw 9y ago
Its definitely better to have a job you enjoy rather than one you hate. You spend a fair bit of your life at it.

welly 9y ago

How about those in the arts as a profession? I don't think they'd have a successful career if they didn't love their job. I think they'd produce pretty abysmal art.

lmm 9y ago
You can be a perfectly good artist as a 9-5 worker; producing good art is much more about, well, doing work, than anything else. The problem is that you're unlikely to be paid well, because you'll have to compete with all the people who are doing art for the fun of it.
tjr 9y ago
I've produced music for others (as a job, if you will), and I've produced music for my own enjoyment and satisfaction. While I do get an amount of enjoyment out of producing music for others, it may or may not be music that I personally like. It has to meet certain criteria. It has to sound like this, use these instruments, or be that duration, or whatever. A lot like programming, I think. I can program on my own time, making whatever I fancy, using whatever language I want, to my own maximum enjoyment. At a programming job, I will likely enjoy it to at least some degree, but I may or may not be doing everything in a way that I think best, because I'm doing the work for the satisfaction of someone else. But then, producing something for someone else, be it software or music or whatever, results in a different kind of satisfaction on my end: the satisfaction of meeting someone else's need. They wanted X, and I made X for them, and they are happy with it. I may or may not like X myself, but I am pleased that they like it!

enkid 9y ago

Given the choice, I would like to do more than just make money when something takes the majority ( or a large minority) of my time. A job can have meaning, and for me that makes it a lot was it? We to wake up in the morning.

collyw 9y ago

Its definitely better to have a job you enjoy rather than one you hate. You spend a fair bit of your life at it.