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by jedberg
1255 days ago
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Work and life is a dichotomy for most people. Most people don't want to work. They do it because they have to. So everything else on the list is "life", and work is work. And we want to balance the two to make sure that we still have enough time for everything we want to do (life), and work. Some people are lucky enough to love their job, so the balance is easy because work is part of life for them. But for most people they'd always rather to more "life" and less "work". |
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I think most of those same people don't want to do the same work 40 hours a week, 48-50 weeks a year, for a boss, probably with significant alienation from the actual product or benefit of the work.
Labor is so very much more tolerable when you can favor entirely different sorts of work, week to week, and can see tangible benefits to your effort—for someone, at least, if not for yourself.
I'd like—genuinely like—programming if I could hit it really hard about one week a month and mostly ignore it the rest of the time. But I hate doing it full-time.
I like building fences. Or tiling floors. Actually like it! I'd hate doing either every single week, all year. I'd hate it a lot. Two or three weeks a year, for each, though? I'd actually enjoy it.
That sort of thing.
Shit, I'm a pretty big gamer, even, but on the rare occasions I get two entire days to do almost nothing but couch-potato and play video games, by the afternoon of day 2 I'm usually done with games for at least a couple weeks. Zero desire to touch them. That's not even work, exactly, but you'd have to pay me to get me to keep going, even with no strings attached (no having to write reports, no bugtesting, just playing games). An average of an hour or two a day, though? 4 hours here, 1 there, 2 another day? I never hit my limit, always want more.
My job is like that, too, but it's constantly at the "I hate this now and wish I could stop" burnout stage, because every week has at least 2x too much of it for it to be sustainable at an enjoyable level.