11 ms·

The key to loving your job in the age of burnout

228 points by rohmanhakim 8y ago

esotericn 8y ago
Seems intuitively obvious to me to the point of being a fluff piece. The article is effectively saying that if your job needs to not be pointless in order for you to do it. If you go to work every day, don't achieve anything in the wider world, don't save for the future, don't have any plans in general, then you're going to have a bad time. That's a completely natural response to, well, wasting your entire life if left unchecked. You can be paid very little but if it allows you to support your family that can be fulfilling.
- tokyodude 8y ago
  it's not enough for me (yet?) for the job to be useful for society at large. quit a job because altough it was useful I was bored
- Piskvorrr 8y ago
  Great qualification in the first sentence: many things that have seemed obvious to me have been hailed as innovative by others - just given the limitations of human mind, this is inevitable. (Could have been summed into one sentence, that much I concede.)
- perfunctory 8y ago
  > The article is effectively saying that if your job needs to not be pointless... What the article is also saying - work less. And this is not so obvious I assume for most readers.
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    balance in life is a skill hard to acquire
    - pojzon 8y ago
      After 6 years of egineering, ive had to stop and start to learn this skill. I lost the ability to rest without thinking about what i could be doing now.. Having a good life/work balance is very hard in modern age. Team hates you because each time you have to go out to LIVE, they feel like they have to do your job too.. Feeling guilty also sux. But what can you do.
alxlaz 8y ago
There's an advice that I tend to give to my younger colleagues who ask about this stuff: love your profession, not your job. I love my profession -- I wanted to be an engineer for as long as I can remember. But that doesn't mean I loved every engineering job I've ever held. If a job makes you dislike what you do to the point where you stop cultivating your abilities, I think you should leave it as soon as you can.
- midgetjones 8y ago
  That's fantastic advice. I think it's a case of caring about the right things, and learning when to let go/not take things personally. On a slight tangent, I've always found that hobbies - and treating programming as one of them - always helps me disassociate from thinking about my own achievements as only being work-related. I've tried so many things, just because they interested me, and got fairly good at some of them. Sometimes it might be a craft, another time it might be learning a new programming language, or a piece of software I don't know well enough. The ones I don't enjoy so much fall by the wayside (life drawing, golang, philosophy, whittling, many more), but some chance subjects have directly led to better jobs (ruby, elixir), some have made me a better programmer, and anything else I can at least say has made me a more rounded and knowledgable person, and hopefully more employable because of it.
- sdoering 8y ago
  Great advice. I would only add to that, that not only can your "job make you dislike what you do", but also the environment you do your job in. Yes - some parts of any job suck. Some parts have to be dealt with and one needs to have at least some kind of tolerance for frustration. But there is a threshold. If the job, the people, the culture around you do not show that they respect and value you, but only the bottom line they can grind you down for: Get out.
  - alxlaz 8y ago
    > I would only add to that, that not only can your "job make you dislike what you do", but also the environment you do your job in. Yeah, I meant "your job" in the generic way, including everything there is about it. Where you work, who you work with, what you do, for whom etc. Every aspect of professional life includes things that we'd rather not deal with. Programming? You're gonna have to write boring boilerplate code sometimes. Poor tooling? You're going to have to convince management to give you the budget you need to fix it, and that's going to involve a lot of politics. Meetings? Some of them are going to be a waste of time but you'll have to attend them. Volunteering projects? Some are genuine, some are there only because someone has some KPIs to meet. These are things that you're going to have to deal with anywhere you go. Things that you don't have to deal with anywhere you go, however, include stuff like abusive behaviour, regular and unpaid overtime with an expectation that "everyone loves what they do and works 60-hour weeks here", or poor working conditions that take a toll on your health. That's stuff that no one should "deal" with (except, you know, by leaving).
perfunctory 8y ago
"For most of human history, work was a drudgery to be borne by those people who had to do it, and avoided by those who could afford to. From ancient Greece to medieval Europe, toil was seen as a necessary evil, and mainly as a misfortune of the poor. " Human history starts waaay before ancient Greece. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Hunter-gatherer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Hunter-gatherer
- pjc50 8y ago
  Human life, yes. History? Not so much. Possibly the only hunter-gatherer civilization we have more than fragments of history from are the Australian Aborigines. This makes it very hard to ask anthropological questions of the past about how people felt about their work.
  - cimmanom 8y ago
    Ancient India, ancient China, ancient Egypt, and ancient Mesopotamia are all civilizations with far older histories (with meaningful archaeological remains and in many cases written records) than ancient Greece. Greece is just where many Euro-centric historical perspectives begin.
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago
  "work was a drudgery ... toil was seen as a necessary evil, and mainly as a misfortune of the poor. " And this is also largely false. Yet another example of the usual tecno-optimism of HN.
RickJWagner 8y ago
"At the same time, we’re brought up to believe that work—not the church, the state, or even the family—is the fountainhead from which our sense of meaning should spring." And therein lies the problem. Ask someone who's recently retired.
keiferski 8y ago
It seems to me that a lot of contemporary burnout stems from the extremely abstract nature of the modern economy. During and after college, I spent 4-5 years working at a bakery. The pay was poor, the hours worse, customers irritating, and career advancement non-existent. And yet, I got to make hundreds of real, physical objects every day, entirely from scratch, and then see people enjoy them. That sort of instant feedback made all the scrubbing, mopping, and change-counting bearable, at least in an obvious cause-effect sense. This counter is covered in flour because I was baking these loaves of bread all day. Compare this to the average office job. For the most part, the end product of a week's or month's work is essentially a bunch of text on a screen. Take a writer, for example. In the past, a journalist or writer would have some physical remnants and products of their work - the notes and manuscripts for their articles and then the final published piece in a newspaper or physical book. Today, they have...a collection of blog posts and internet articles. The physicality of the work has evaporated entirely. I don't really know if this is a solvable problem in the near future, but I hope that the digital economy takes a turn back towards some sense of physicality.
- qntty 8y ago
  This is what Marx calls "alienation from the product of your labor".
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    One reason why Ford had to raise salaries to the famous five dollars a day was that workers were turned from craftsmen to simple cogs on the assembly line and didn’t want to do that boring and repetitive job. I feel the same is happening in software. Compared to the 90s it feels much more like assembly line work where a worker does something very specialized and repeats it over and over.
    - beat 8y ago
      And Ford's wage increase has been famously and misleadingly mythologized as a favor he did to his employees so they could afford to buy his cars. Matthew Crawford's takedown of this bullshit in Shop Class as Soulcraft is delicious.
malvosenior 8y ago
I find that the key to me loving my job is: working remotely. Doesn't really matter what the company does, if I have to commute and go to an open office floor plan, I'm not happy.
- Insanity 8y ago
  Working remotely, part of the time, sure. I do like the interaction with people that I get at my job. It's not entirely the same over slack, but that might be because the people whom I work with tend to be more "in-person people". Apart from that, I also like that going to the office gives me a chance to go outside, if I'd work remotely.. I'd probably only go outside a few days a week. OTOH, open floor plans and commuting does suck. And I'm happy (and more productive) the days that I do work from home.
cvoss 8y ago
> "But with the rise of Protestantism, work was ennobled. Martin Luther for the first time suggested that an individual’s work—whether it was making shoes or building churches—could be a way of serving God, and that the harder we worked (and, by default, the more money we made), the better God would be pleased. > "That Protestant work ethic dominates in the US to a greater degree than almost anywhere else because it is a relatively young country without a long, prevalent pre-Protestant history..." I've heard this theory of the protestant work ethic many times very recently. I grew up in what I think was a very typical American protestant culture, where, yes, work is ennobled ("all work is a high calling, not just clerical work") but I have never encountered this sentiment to the workaholic extreme that is being associated to it. Just the opposite was true: a huge emphasis was placed on the Sabbath commandment. Not in the legalistic, "it's a sin if you work on Sundays" kind of way, but definitely in the work-life balance, burnout-avoiding kind of way. Sabbath rest has always been centrally important to the brand of protestant work ethic that I came up in. Curious if others have different experiences?
- zebrafish 8y ago
  Agree with you. Disagree with article. Reformed thinking says that God created work, and thus work is good and it is intended to fulfill humanity. However, work, money, status, career progression, are idols. Two laws since the resurrection: love God, love your neighbor. You can love God by working, but it is not the only means and work for work's sake should not be loved or exalted.
- framebit 8y ago
  IMO the Protestant work ethic, while it has its roots in the ennobling of work in service to God, quickly got twisted through the Puritans and their adherence to "working out your salvation" rather than "for it is by grace you have been saved, through faith, not by works so that no one can boast." Even if that wasn't the official theology, that's certainly the behavioral tradition. And this quickly got twisted into the fundamental American myth: you get what you deserve. Are you wealthy? Then you must have worked hard. Are you poor? Then you must be lazy. Did participating in an essential oils MLM bankrupt your family? You just didn't want success enough. So the protestant work ethic in a modern sense, (IMO, of course) is ennobling work BECAUSE your "righteousness" for whatever religious or non-religious definition you want to use is based in your hardworkingness.
dalbasal 8y ago
Besides inherent meaning in the work itself (like zookeeping) I think the information economy is just structurally stressful... when you look decades ahead. Career progression can feel like an up-or-out pyramid. Many devs feel (rightly or wrongly) like they need to progress to super-dev or manager by 35, because who's going to hire a 40 to engineer, especially when the tech stack/tools get a reset every 5 years. ..and devs have it good, ATM. High demand, at least some respect for experience. Who's hiring a 49 year old social media ambassador? Will the arcane understanding of azure enterprise pricing and configuration that keeps you employed today get you employed in 2025? How about agile expertise? I think people look at their jobs, and just can't see a safe path to retirement at 66. The job, or the company won't exist by then. It's stressful. My grandad was a farmer and builder. His father and brothers were farmer-tradesmen too. By 30 he had acquired some land, stock, a light truck and tools for the contracting business. He raised cattle and built houses until retirement (when he traded building for running a BnB, and still farmed a little). The point is that people expected their career to have long term legs. A lot of the new information economy feels very fleeting, by comparison. Meanwhile most of us have fathers, aunts or whatnot that found themselves unemployed in their 50s after a promising-seeming 40s. Travel agents when Expedia happened. Programmers when the dot-com bust happened... real estators when that happened, Greek civil servants when Greece went bust...
- fukbezos 8y ago
  You're delusional if you think a 40 year old engineer can't find work. While standards can change over 5 years, companies certainly aren't retooling every 5 years. Once you get going and scale, you tend to stick with what works for tons of reasons
- save_ferris 8y ago
  yep, and trying to stay relevant in the web development world is exhausting. I learned SQL once, and it's carried me throughout my career. Every 2-3 years, the ideal JS developer checklist completely changes, and now I need to learn how to bundle and deploy JS apps yet again. It gets less and less fun re-learning how to do the same thing over and over again. I used to love learning all about the latest greatest tools in the web world; but I just don't have that kind of energy anymore. It drives me crazy to have to go through the process of learning gulp/webpack/rollup/whatever new JS tool comes out in 2019/2020.
papermill 8y ago
Why should anyone love their job? You should love your family and friends, not your job. I guess it'll be ideal if you could enjoy your job, but it's insane to love it. Besides, most people have a job to survive and eventually retire ( not have job ). I wonder when and where the idea of loving your job came about.
- lm28469 8y ago
  It's the #1 time consuming thing in your life. You spend most of the day doing it, for most of your life. It's not the 1800s anymore. "Unfortunately for these neo-economist thinkers, these proofs belong to the nineteenth century, a time when the misery of the working classes made the right to work the counterpart of the right to be a slave, claimed at the dawn of time by prisoners about to be massacred. Above all it was a question of surviving, of not disappearing physically. The imperatives of production are the imperatives of survival; from now on, people want to live, not just to survive." - Raoul Vaneigem
- adrianmonk 8y ago
  I think you can love a job without taking it too far. It's true that someone who loves a job could be taken advantage of by an employer who feels like that gives them leverage. And it could lead to problems with work / life balance. But, I don't think that means a middle road is impossible. One can love food without being overweight. You just have to practice moderation. Loving something doesn't mean there are no limits to how much of it you try to cram into your life.
sametmax 8y ago
Again an advice without applicable steps. We have so many insights on how we work, and so few practical way of using them.
- beat 8y ago
  There's an easy, applicable step... don't have a bullshit job. Unfortunately, bullshit jobs tend to pay better. That's because without the money, no one would do them.
  - sametmax 8y ago
    I don't, and it's nowhere from the solution.
- lm28469 8y ago
  It's life, read things, make up your opinions and implement the details yourself. I didn't even read half the article and it's already talking about not working full time. That's a very actionable thing.
  - sametmax 8y ago
    Already do, and it doesn't work.
taffronaut 8y ago
Hill farming sheep has no career progression, every year is the same brutal sequence, and you're at the mercy of whatever meagre prices the market sets for meat and fleeces. The tangible outputs vs office work does not seem sufficient compensation in many cases. http://www.farmbusiness.co.uk/news/more-then-one-farmer-a-week-in-the-uk-dies-by-suicide-2.html http://www.farmbusiness.co.uk/news/more-then-one-farmer-a-we...
msluyter 8y ago
I wish I could articulate precisely what -- a the age of cough cough -something -- has kept me engaged and happy as a software developer. In part, I've been lucky. I've mostly had decent jobs and companies that treated employees humanely. Partly, I feel that I keep improving at what I do, and that alone is somewhat satisfying. Partly, I just like thinking and solving puzzles, which pretty much describes actual coding. Contrast that to my wife, who, despite having a degree from a top ivy league school, seems to have hated every job she's ever had and would drop it all to retire in an instant if she could afford it. I will note that I also have had the luxury of exploring the "do what you love" career theory. Out of high school, I wanted to be an orchestral musician, and spent like 12 years pursuing that path before realizing that it wasn't going to work out. So I sort of had to reset my brain to understand that I didn't have to do this one thing to be happy. So I'm not sitting here in a cubicle thinking "if only...." because I've done the "if only." (Not having other options is actually a surprisingly effective route to happiness. (See: Stumbling on Happiness)). Another great book related to this topic is "How to Want What You Have." https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/933037.How_to_Want_What_You_Have https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/933037.How_to_Want_What_...
- Haul4ss 8y ago
  A big part of this is just how you see the world, and perhaps how well you understand yourself. Not sure which term to use: attitude, personality, outlook, frame of mind, perspective, etc. I have definitely had times in my career when I dreaded going to work. Like I could feel an actual physical weight on my shoulders as I drove up to the office. In my current season in life, I can see a lot more what is good and what is bad, what I'm willing to put up with and what I'm not, what I'm good at and what I'm not, what is actually a big deal versus what is just a big deal in my mind, and so on. That perspective will keep me more happy in any job, even ones that other people may dislike. But it also draws me to work that I know will keep me happy because I understand what contentment is in a way I didn't understand 15-20 years ago. If I won the lottery tomorrow, would I stay in my current job? Probably not. But that doesn't mean I'm unhappy in the job -- as ways to earn money go, this one is pretty nice. But it was a circuitous path to get here, and I think the biggest lie we can perpetrate on young folks is that there is a single passion they should pursue to find their calling. Almost no one gets it right on their first try.
qwsxyh 8y ago
I think it's pretty sad the concept of loving your job even exists.
- sgillen 8y ago
  Why? Do you see it as a way to fool people into working harder against their own best interests? I think there are people who genuinely love their job and I think that's OK.
scarejunba 8y ago
The key for me was working less. Much happier now.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
bambax 8y ago
There's something overlooked about zookeepers and many other professions: it's done _outside_. Being outside, directly under the sun, makes us happy, regardless of weather or temperature. I don't think one can be happy being inside all of the time (inside the home, the car, the office, the gym, the mall...) I see trash collectors every day, singing while doing their job. It's one of the least considered occupation, and maybe least enviable. Yet if we ever saw an office worker sing, we'd think they'd gone crazy. I think we need to find a way to put a little more Nature in office jobs.
- elindbe2 8y ago
  This is so true. Every time there's a nice sunny workday, I'm looking out the window thinking "wtf am I doing in here?". In fact, I think it's possible that many of our feelings of anomie and meaninglessness at work could be a misinterpretation our bodies' signal that says: "hey you! get out of this cave and go gather some berries!"
dontbenebby 8y ago
The key to loving your job is to remember it is a job. While not all jobs are fun, it's likely most HN posters have it a lot better than say, a construction worker. By all means, try to find work you find interesting/exciting, but I think you set yourself up for failure and sadness if you expect the same level of joy from paid work that you will get from your hobbies.
peterwwillis 8y ago
My friends with 3 jobs don't get burnout. They work the hours they're scheduled (or get paid overtime). You perform tasks for a few hours (sometimes very long hours), but then you're done for the day, and the next day you start anew. Some days are worse than others, but in general, work doesn't pile up; you just do what you can each day. The work isn't "carried over" into subsequent days or weeks. Office work feels more like pushing a boulder uphill, and if you don't make enough progress, the hill's incline seems to get steeper.
paulcole 8y ago
My key takeaway is that I should pay my employees less and make them pick up more feces.
gaze 8y ago
How about that it's just as simple as burnout being a problem of employers asking too much from their employees?
tvh 8y ago
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36531574-bullshit-jobs https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36531574-bullshit-jobs
musicale 8y ago
Summary: This article suggests that the "key" to making a horrible modern job slightly less intolerable is: slacking off as much as possible (or at the very least lowering the priority of work in your life as much as you can) and being very blatant about it so that everyone else is encouraged to follow your example. ;-)

228 points by rohmanhakim 8y ago

Seems intuitively obvious to me to the point of being a fluff piece. The article is effectively saying that if your job needs to not be pointless in order for you to do it. If you go to work every day, don't achieve anything in the wider world, don't save for the future, don't have any plans in general, then you're going to have a bad time. That's a completely natural response to, well, wasting your entire life if left unchecked. You can be paid very little but if it allows you to support your family that can be fulfilling.

tokyodude 8y ago
it's not enough for me (yet?) for the job to be useful for society at large. quit a job because altough it was useful I was bored
Piskvorrr 8y ago
Great qualification in the first sentence: many things that have seemed obvious to me have been hailed as innovative by others - just given the limitations of human mind, this is inevitable. (Could have been summed into one sentence, that much I concede.)
perfunctory 8y ago
> The article is effectively saying that if your job needs to not be pointless... What the article is also saying - work less. And this is not so obvious I assume for most readers.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  balance in life is a skill hard to acquire
  - pojzon 8y ago
    After 6 years of egineering, ive had to stop and start to learn this skill. I lost the ability to rest without thinking about what i could be doing now.. Having a good life/work balance is very hard in modern age. Team hates you because each time you have to go out to LIVE, they feel like they have to do your job too.. Feeling guilty also sux. But what can you do.

alxlaz 8y ago

There's an advice that I tend to give to my younger colleagues who ask about this stuff: love your profession, not your job. I love my profession -- I wanted to be an engineer for as long as I can remember. But that doesn't mean I loved every engineering job I've ever held. If a job makes you dislike what you do to the point where you stop cultivating your abilities, I think you should leave it as soon as you can.

midgetjones 8y ago
That's fantastic advice. I think it's a case of caring about the right things, and learning when to let go/not take things personally. On a slight tangent, I've always found that hobbies - and treating programming as one of them - always helps me disassociate from thinking about my own achievements as only being work-related. I've tried so many things, just because they interested me, and got fairly good at some of them. Sometimes it might be a craft, another time it might be learning a new programming language, or a piece of software I don't know well enough. The ones I don't enjoy so much fall by the wayside (life drawing, golang, philosophy, whittling, many more), but some chance subjects have directly led to better jobs (ruby, elixir), some have made me a better programmer, and anything else I can at least say has made me a more rounded and knowledgable person, and hopefully more employable because of it.
sdoering 8y ago
Great advice. I would only add to that, that not only can your "job make you dislike what you do", but also the environment you do your job in. Yes - some parts of any job suck. Some parts have to be dealt with and one needs to have at least some kind of tolerance for frustration. But there is a threshold. If the job, the people, the culture around you do not show that they respect and value you, but only the bottom line they can grind you down for: Get out.
- alxlaz 8y ago
  > I would only add to that, that not only can your "job make you dislike what you do", but also the environment you do your job in. Yeah, I meant "your job" in the generic way, including everything there is about it. Where you work, who you work with, what you do, for whom etc. Every aspect of professional life includes things that we'd rather not deal with. Programming? You're gonna have to write boring boilerplate code sometimes. Poor tooling? You're going to have to convince management to give you the budget you need to fix it, and that's going to involve a lot of politics. Meetings? Some of them are going to be a waste of time but you'll have to attend them. Volunteering projects? Some are genuine, some are there only because someone has some KPIs to meet. These are things that you're going to have to deal with anywhere you go. Things that you don't have to deal with anywhere you go, however, include stuff like abusive behaviour, regular and unpaid overtime with an expectation that "everyone loves what they do and works 60-hour weeks here", or poor working conditions that take a toll on your health. That's stuff that no one should "deal" with (except, you know, by leaving).

perfunctory 8y ago

"For most of human history, work was a drudgery to be borne by those people who had to do it, and avoided by those who could afford to. From ancient Greece to medieval Europe, toil was seen as a necessary evil, and mainly as a misfortune of the poor. " Human history starts waaay before ancient Greece. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Hunter-gatherer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Hunter-gatherer

pjc50 8y ago
Human life, yes. History? Not so much. Possibly the only hunter-gatherer civilization we have more than fragments of history from are the Australian Aborigines. This makes it very hard to ask anthropological questions of the past about how people felt about their work.
- cimmanom 8y ago
  Ancient India, ancient China, ancient Egypt, and ancient Mesopotamia are all civilizations with far older histories (with meaningful archaeological remains and in many cases written records) than ancient Greece. Greece is just where many Euro-centric historical perspectives begin.
eeZah7Ux 8y ago
"work was a drudgery ... toil was seen as a necessary evil, and mainly as a misfortune of the poor. " And this is also largely false. Yet another example of the usual tecno-optimism of HN.

RickJWagner 8y ago

"At the same time, we’re brought up to believe that work—not the church, the state, or even the family—is the fountainhead from which our sense of meaning should spring." And therein lies the problem. Ask someone who's recently retired.

keiferski 8y ago

It seems to me that a lot of contemporary burnout stems from the extremely abstract nature of the modern economy. During and after college, I spent 4-5 years working at a bakery. The pay was poor, the hours worse, customers irritating, and career advancement non-existent. And yet, I got to make hundreds of real, physical objects every day, entirely from scratch, and then see people enjoy them. That sort of instant feedback made all the scrubbing, mopping, and change-counting bearable, at least in an obvious cause-effect sense. This counter is covered in flour because I was baking these loaves of bread all day. Compare this to the average office job. For the most part, the end product of a week's or month's work is essentially a bunch of text on a screen. Take a writer, for example. In the past, a journalist or writer would have some physical remnants and products of their work - the notes and manuscripts for their articles and then the final published piece in a newspaper or physical book. Today, they have...a collection of blog posts and internet articles. The physicality of the work has evaporated entirely. I don't really know if this is a solvable problem in the near future, but I hope that the digital economy takes a turn back towards some sense of physicality.

qntty 8y ago
This is what Marx calls "alienation from the product of your labor".
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  One reason why Ford had to raise salaries to the famous five dollars a day was that workers were turned from craftsmen to simple cogs on the assembly line and didn’t want to do that boring and repetitive job. I feel the same is happening in software. Compared to the 90s it feels much more like assembly line work where a worker does something very specialized and repeats it over and over.
  - beat 8y ago
    And Ford's wage increase has been famously and misleadingly mythologized as a favor he did to his employees so they could afford to buy his cars. Matthew Crawford's takedown of this bullshit in Shop Class as Soulcraft is delicious.

malvosenior 8y ago

I find that the key to me loving my job is: working remotely. Doesn't really matter what the company does, if I have to commute and go to an open office floor plan, I'm not happy.

Insanity 8y ago
Working remotely, part of the time, sure. I do like the interaction with people that I get at my job. It's not entirely the same over slack, but that might be because the people whom I work with tend to be more "in-person people". Apart from that, I also like that going to the office gives me a chance to go outside, if I'd work remotely.. I'd probably only go outside a few days a week. OTOH, open floor plans and commuting does suck. And I'm happy (and more productive) the days that I do work from home.

cvoss 8y ago

> "But with the rise of Protestantism, work was ennobled. Martin Luther for the first time suggested that an individual’s work—whether it was making shoes or building churches—could be a way of serving God, and that the harder we worked (and, by default, the more money we made), the better God would be pleased. > "That Protestant work ethic dominates in the US to a greater degree than almost anywhere else because it is a relatively young country without a long, prevalent pre-Protestant history..." I've heard this theory of the protestant work ethic many times very recently. I grew up in what I think was a very typical American protestant culture, where, yes, work is ennobled ("all work is a high calling, not just clerical work") but I have never encountered this sentiment to the workaholic extreme that is being associated to it. Just the opposite was true: a huge emphasis was placed on the Sabbath commandment. Not in the legalistic, "it's a sin if you work on Sundays" kind of way, but definitely in the work-life balance, burnout-avoiding kind of way. Sabbath rest has always been centrally important to the brand of protestant work ethic that I came up in. Curious if others have different experiences?

zebrafish 8y ago
Agree with you. Disagree with article. Reformed thinking says that God created work, and thus work is good and it is intended to fulfill humanity. However, work, money, status, career progression, are idols. Two laws since the resurrection: love God, love your neighbor. You can love God by working, but it is not the only means and work for work's sake should not be loved or exalted.
framebit 8y ago
IMO the Protestant work ethic, while it has its roots in the ennobling of work in service to God, quickly got twisted through the Puritans and their adherence to "working out your salvation" rather than "for it is by grace you have been saved, through faith, not by works so that no one can boast." Even if that wasn't the official theology, that's certainly the behavioral tradition. And this quickly got twisted into the fundamental American myth: you get what you deserve. Are you wealthy? Then you must have worked hard. Are you poor? Then you must be lazy. Did participating in an essential oils MLM bankrupt your family? You just didn't want success enough. So the protestant work ethic in a modern sense, (IMO, of course) is ennobling work BECAUSE your "righteousness" for whatever religious or non-religious definition you want to use is based in your hardworkingness.

dalbasal 8y ago

Besides inherent meaning in the work itself (like zookeeping) I think the information economy is just structurally stressful... when you look decades ahead. Career progression can feel like an up-or-out pyramid. Many devs feel (rightly or wrongly) like they need to progress to super-dev or manager by 35, because who's going to hire a 40 to engineer, especially when the tech stack/tools get a reset every 5 years. ..and devs have it good, ATM. High demand, at least some respect for experience. Who's hiring a 49 year old social media ambassador? Will the arcane understanding of azure enterprise pricing and configuration that keeps you employed today get you employed in 2025? How about agile expertise? I think people look at their jobs, and just can't see a safe path to retirement at 66. The job, or the company won't exist by then. It's stressful. My grandad was a farmer and builder. His father and brothers were farmer-tradesmen too. By 30 he had acquired some land, stock, a light truck and tools for the contracting business. He raised cattle and built houses until retirement (when he traded building for running a BnB, and still farmed a little). The point is that people expected their career to have long term legs. A lot of the new information economy feels very fleeting, by comparison. Meanwhile most of us have fathers, aunts or whatnot that found themselves unemployed in their 50s after a promising-seeming 40s. Travel agents when Expedia happened. Programmers when the dot-com bust happened... real estators when that happened, Greek civil servants when Greece went bust...

fukbezos 8y ago
You're delusional if you think a 40 year old engineer can't find work. While standards can change over 5 years, companies certainly aren't retooling every 5 years. Once you get going and scale, you tend to stick with what works for tons of reasons
save_ferris 8y ago
yep, and trying to stay relevant in the web development world is exhausting. I learned SQL once, and it's carried me throughout my career. Every 2-3 years, the ideal JS developer checklist completely changes, and now I need to learn how to bundle and deploy JS apps yet again. It gets less and less fun re-learning how to do the same thing over and over again. I used to love learning all about the latest greatest tools in the web world; but I just don't have that kind of energy anymore. It drives me crazy to have to go through the process of learning gulp/webpack/rollup/whatever new JS tool comes out in 2019/2020.

papermill 8y ago

Why should anyone love their job? You should love your family and friends, not your job. I guess it'll be ideal if you could enjoy your job, but it's insane to love it. Besides, most people have a job to survive and eventually retire ( not have job ). I wonder when and where the idea of loving your job came about.

lm28469 8y ago
It's the #1 time consuming thing in your life. You spend most of the day doing it, for most of your life. It's not the 1800s anymore. "Unfortunately for these neo-economist thinkers, these proofs belong to the nineteenth century, a time when the misery of the working classes made the right to work the counterpart of the right to be a slave, claimed at the dawn of time by prisoners about to be massacred. Above all it was a question of surviving, of not disappearing physically. The imperatives of production are the imperatives of survival; from now on, people want to live, not just to survive." - Raoul Vaneigem
adrianmonk 8y ago
I think you can love a job without taking it too far. It's true that someone who loves a job could be taken advantage of by an employer who feels like that gives them leverage. And it could lead to problems with work / life balance. But, I don't think that means a middle road is impossible. One can love food without being overweight. You just have to practice moderation. Loving something doesn't mean there are no limits to how much of it you try to cram into your life.

sametmax 8y ago

Again an advice without applicable steps. We have so many insights on how we work, and so few practical way of using them.

beat 8y ago
There's an easy, applicable step... don't have a bullshit job. Unfortunately, bullshit jobs tend to pay better. That's because without the money, no one would do them.
- sametmax 8y ago
  I don't, and it's nowhere from the solution.
lm28469 8y ago
It's life, read things, make up your opinions and implement the details yourself. I didn't even read half the article and it's already talking about not working full time. That's a very actionable thing.
- sametmax 8y ago
  Already do, and it doesn't work.

taffronaut 8y ago

Hill farming sheep has no career progression, every year is the same brutal sequence, and you're at the mercy of whatever meagre prices the market sets for meat and fleeces. The tangible outputs vs office work does not seem sufficient compensation in many cases. http://www.farmbusiness.co.uk/news/more-then-one-farmer-a-week-in-the-uk-dies-by-suicide-2.html http://www.farmbusiness.co.uk/news/more-then-one-farmer-a-we...

msluyter 8y ago

I wish I could articulate precisely what -- a the age of cough cough -something -- has kept me engaged and happy as a software developer. In part, I've been lucky. I've mostly had decent jobs and companies that treated employees humanely. Partly, I feel that I keep improving at what I do, and that alone is somewhat satisfying. Partly, I just like thinking and solving puzzles, which pretty much describes actual coding. Contrast that to my wife, who, despite having a degree from a top ivy league school, seems to have hated every job she's ever had and would drop it all to retire in an instant if she could afford it. I will note that I also have had the luxury of exploring the "do what you love" career theory. Out of high school, I wanted to be an orchestral musician, and spent like 12 years pursuing that path before realizing that it wasn't going to work out. So I sort of had to reset my brain to understand that I didn't have to do this one thing to be happy. So I'm not sitting here in a cubicle thinking "if only...." because I've done the "if only." (Not having other options is actually a surprisingly effective route to happiness. (See: Stumbling on Happiness)). Another great book related to this topic is "How to Want What You Have." https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/933037.How_to_Want_What_You_Have https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/933037.How_to_Want_What_...

Haul4ss 8y ago
A big part of this is just how you see the world, and perhaps how well you understand yourself. Not sure which term to use: attitude, personality, outlook, frame of mind, perspective, etc. I have definitely had times in my career when I dreaded going to work. Like I could feel an actual physical weight on my shoulders as I drove up to the office. In my current season in life, I can see a lot more what is good and what is bad, what I'm willing to put up with and what I'm not, what I'm good at and what I'm not, what is actually a big deal versus what is just a big deal in my mind, and so on. That perspective will keep me more happy in any job, even ones that other people may dislike. But it also draws me to work that I know will keep me happy because I understand what contentment is in a way I didn't understand 15-20 years ago. If I won the lottery tomorrow, would I stay in my current job? Probably not. But that doesn't mean I'm unhappy in the job -- as ways to earn money go, this one is pretty nice. But it was a circuitous path to get here, and I think the biggest lie we can perpetrate on young folks is that there is a single passion they should pursue to find their calling. Almost no one gets it right on their first try.

qwsxyh 8y ago

I think it's pretty sad the concept of loving your job even exists.

sgillen 8y ago
Why? Do you see it as a way to fool people into working harder against their own best interests? I think there are people who genuinely love their job and I think that's OK.

scarejunba 8y ago

The key for me was working less. Much happier now.

deleted 8y ago

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bambax 8y ago

There's something overlooked about zookeepers and many other professions: it's done _outside_. Being outside, directly under the sun, makes us happy, regardless of weather or temperature. I don't think one can be happy being inside all of the time (inside the home, the car, the office, the gym, the mall...) I see trash collectors every day, singing while doing their job. It's one of the least considered occupation, and maybe least enviable. Yet if we ever saw an office worker sing, we'd think they'd gone crazy. I think we need to find a way to put a little more Nature in office jobs.

elindbe2 8y ago
This is so true. Every time there's a nice sunny workday, I'm looking out the window thinking "wtf am I doing in here?". In fact, I think it's possible that many of our feelings of anomie and meaninglessness at work could be a misinterpretation our bodies' signal that says: "hey you! get out of this cave and go gather some berries!"

dontbenebby 8y ago

The key to loving your job is to remember it is a job. While not all jobs are fun, it's likely most HN posters have it a lot better than say, a construction worker. By all means, try to find work you find interesting/exciting, but I think you set yourself up for failure and sadness if you expect the same level of joy from paid work that you will get from your hobbies.

peterwwillis 8y ago

My friends with 3 jobs don't get burnout. They work the hours they're scheduled (or get paid overtime). You perform tasks for a few hours (sometimes very long hours), but then you're done for the day, and the next day you start anew. Some days are worse than others, but in general, work doesn't pile up; you just do what you can each day. The work isn't "carried over" into subsequent days or weeks. Office work feels more like pushing a boulder uphill, and if you don't make enough progress, the hill's incline seems to get steeper.

paulcole 8y ago

My key takeaway is that I should pay my employees less and make them pick up more feces.

gaze 8y ago

How about that it's just as simple as burnout being a problem of employers asking too much from their employees?

tvh 8y ago

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36531574-bullshit-jobs https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36531574-bullshit-jobs

musicale 8y ago

Summary: This article suggests that the "key" to making a horrible modern job slightly less intolerable is: slacking off as much as possible (or at the very least lowering the priority of work in your life as much as you can) and being very blatant about it so that everyone else is encouraged to follow your example. ;-)