[disown]

> You don't have to love every day of a job to love the job.

You shouldn't love your job. A job isn't a person. You should love your friends and family. A job is what you do for money. Like a trick, michael.

I would love to know when the idea of "loving your job" came into the culture. It feels so manufactured like "I (heart)/love NY". Similar to "productivity" today. "Have you been productive today"? When did "productivity" sneak into the culture.

Edit: The replies indicate what I am talking about. People are so conditioned into thinking that you should "love" your job that they get defensive when you point out that a job isn't something that you should "love". You can enjoy your job, you can get fulfillment from your job, but a job isn't a person. It isn't something that you should "love". Words matter. I don't like how love has been hijacked into a meaningless term now. I love my job, my hobby, my football team, etc. Someone wrote they spent decades with a job they loved. If you did, then you wasted your life. Do other countries/languages also "love their job" or is this an american thing? It's such a strange thing to "love". Strangely enough, only on hacker news would you people so religious defend their love of their job.

[kelnos]

(Replying after your clarifying edit.)

You seem to have a very narrow definition of what "love" is and want to deny people the ability to love in whatever way makes them happy, which is a bit uncharitable of you.

I think maybe I get the root of your complaint; there are some people who drink the kool aid and get stuck in what amounts to an abusive relationship with their job, and stay there out of some sort of warped "love". That is genuinely bad. That is also not what anyone in this thread is talking about when they say they love their job.

I have at times loved my job. I have at times only liked it. And sometimes actively disliked or hated it. I've also loved romantic partners, family, and friends. My love for a job is different than my love for a romantic partner, which is a different love than the love I have for family, which is also a different love than the love I have for friends. That doesn't cheapen the value of any of these kinds of love, and neither does broadening your horizons to accept other kinds of love that you perhaps don't feel yourself.

There are many different kinds of love, and no person has any business telling others how to love or how not to love. This has nothing to do with "conditioning" or "defensiveness". You just don't get to decide this for anyone but yourself, and complaining about how other people love is as meaningless as complaining that the sky is blue.

[bigiain]

> My love for a job is different than my love for a romantic partner, which is a different love than the love I have for family, which is also a different love than the love I have for friends.

Interestingly, languages other than english have different words for those different forms of what English all lumps in as "love".

In Greek (at least ancient Greek, anyway), "romantic love" is eros, "family love" is philia or storge, and "friend love" is xenia or philia. (I don't understand the subtleties of those last two where they cross over...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love

It seems the ancient Greeks did not have a work for "job love", which is interesting to me in terms of the upthread discussion.

I wonder if the paucity of English language around different types of "love" is a cause of the kind of misuse of the concept to apply to things like "I love my job", or if it's a symptom of it - with language shaping and forcing our understanding and deep deep thought structures?

Are there any Greek speakers reading here who could tell me if those multiple differing words for love still exists in modern Greek, and if so how the concept of "I love my job" would be expressed in Greek, and what the word and definition/connotations of the version of "love" that'd be used in that context are?

[Diederich]

I have loved most of my jobs over my 27 year professional career.

I love my family even more...by a large margin.

Team members at every organization I've worked with have heard me say, when asked to join them for drinks after work, "Hey, I like you guys and that sounds fun, but I like my family even more. Have a great time!"

> You shouldn't love your job.

Why not? I consider myself exceedingly fortunate and lucky to be in the tiny minority of people who has had the high privilege of really enjoying/loving the work I get to do.

> A job is what you do for money.

Yup! It can be more than that, but that's the baseline. What's wrong with really enjoying/loving that which you do to make money?

[izacus]

> Team members at every organization I've worked with have heard me say, when asked to join them for drinks after work, "Hey, I like you guys and that sounds fun, but I like my family even more. Have a great time!"

How are drinks with friends / corworkers related with loving your family?

[Diederich]

I do socialize with my co-workers, but only secondarily. Time with them is time away from my family, and I greatly prefer the latter.

[nelc]

Slightly off topic, but all this talk assumes the person has good relationship with their immediate family, and/or is having a successful romantic relationship. Something that I, as a fresh graduate single dude who's not on great terms with family, would argue is also a privileged position. You really shouldn't judge what people choose to enjoy in their lives without knowing their circumstances.

[Diederich]

Yes, this is all true and good to keep in mind. Thank you for raising that point.

[DrSiemer]

Frankly it baffles me how people can go through life wasting away most of their prime waking hours on a job they don't love.

Maybe I'm privileged to have had this option, but I've always avoided better paying jobs that didn't feel good to go for the ones that I enjoy every single day.

Meanwhile I see mates slog through their weeks, burning themselves out on neverending meaningless work, which pays well but basically means they are living mostly for the weekend. How did accepting that as the norm sneak into our culture?

[opencl]

A lot of people don't have much opportunity to land a job that they love. If I could find a job I love I would hop right on that, instead I work in a warehouse for $15 an hour. I think "the norm" is closer to this than the high paying soul-sucking jobs (see: 2019 US median personal income of $36K).

Though I too am baffled by the people in highly skilled professions who willingly take jobs they hate to make more money when they could probably easily find a somewhat lower paying (but still quite decent) job that they enjoy a lot more.

[ImaCake]

>Maybe I'm privileged to have had this option

You are privileged, and I definitely am too. But a simple, extreme, counterfactual works to demonstrate that many do not get this option: Picture a working mother with three children to feed and lives week-to-week with no opportunity to gain new skills. Her only option is going to be to work literally whatever appears. I suspect similar applies to most people who appear to be middle class as well.

[bigiain]

Also, consider all those jobs you choose not to do. _Somebody_ does them, and rarely because they have differently wired brains and they actively enjoy the work you've rejected. People who clean toilets, or collect trash, or any of those other unskilled menial jobs that absolutely need doing in society aren't "enjoying this jobs every single day".

>> How did accepting that as the norm sneak into our culture?

I think you've got that totally back to front. The typical HN reader is _super privileged_ to even be able to think about choosing "a job that I love" over a less fulfilling job. 99% of the humans on the planet are doing whatever job they can just to survive. "A job that you love" has never been "the norm in our culture". Pretending most people don't just "go through life wasting away most of their prime waking hours on a job they don't love" is ignoring the lived existence of practically everybody you see each day that's not in a FAANG Michelin-starred cafeteria or double-digit equity incentivised at a swing-for-the-fences startup.

[DrSiemer]

Apologies for not being more clear about this in my original comment, but I was not talking about the unfortunate people who don't have a choice. I had the HN crowd in mind when I mentioned my mates, who definitely DO have other options that would drastically improve their quality of life, but STILL choose to stick with the job that makes them miserable.

The jobs I passed on were not bad in any way, but would often require me to sell my soul in one way or another.

Besides that, if for some reason all I could do was an "unskilled menial job", I would still find the one that had at least some element which I could enjoy. I would grow into it and eventually learn to love my job or find another one.

This was all in response to the person who made the claim that "you should not love your job", which I simply don't agree with. But in his edit it appears that it's mostly an issue of semantics. "Love" has a lot of ambiguous meanings in the English language.

[hnracer]

You can love your job in the same way that you can love a hobby that you're passionate about, where you look forward to Mondays, and get genuine excitement and pleasure from the work.

I think that's what people mean when they say they love their job.

[seanhunter]

Why the heck shouldn't you love your job if you want to? Love isn't something you have a finite supply of that you have to dole out sparingly. Loving your job or your city or your dog or whatever else doesn't "use up" love that you then no longer have available to give to your friends or family or devalue it or whatever. Love is something that you generate more of as you give it away.

My wife is a musician, I used to be a musician, I have a lot of friends in the arts of one kind or another. You can be damn sure they love their jobs (because basically noone goes into most kinds of artistic careers thinking they will make any sort of living over and above the barest kind of subsistance).

[kjs3]

TL;DR: I have decided that a word with multiple definitions[1] has only one that I accept. Anyone who does not accept my definition is wrong, and I will double down on pushing my singular definition of a word, because someone is wrong on the internet![2]

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/love, which includes:

2: warm attachment, enthusiasm, or devotion love of the sea

and

3: to like or desire actively : take pleasure in loved to play the violin 4: to thrive in the rose loves sunlight

[2] https://xkcd.com/386/