That’s totally backwards. Most people do their jobs because it pays the bills. Most people don’t have careers, with some glorious internal narrative in which they’re the protagonist. They have jobs. If they’re lucky or good spirited, they’ll find satisfaction or even enjoyment in their work. But they work because it gives them the means to get what they need and do at least some of what they really want to do.
Most people do not care about their jobs. And they have jobs, not careers. They work because they get paid. Occasionally they get a brief flicker of satisfaction. More often they enjoy the company of their co-workers. Occasionally they hate their jobs so much that they engage in unhealthy behaviors s as a coping mechanism, like alcoholism, or they quit.
Basically everyone who doesn’t stay heavily involved in their professional field after retirement was doing it almost solely for money. There are better and worse jobs, more and less enjoyable ones. But a huge majority of people have jobs, not careers.
Not everyone works for money. In fact most people I personally know (no, I'm not sure that's a good representation) don't. What is quite common though among large groups of people is that they get extremely bored and lonely without their jobs. It is frightening to talk with people and find out that they would have nothing at all to do if they would not have their jobs; their hobbies (if they have them) don't give them enough satisfaction to do them longer than a few hours a week.
I don't have to work but I find myself working more as I enjoy it even though I have hobbies to keep me busy.
The unstated fundamental assertion of this is that people only work because of money, and to amass huge sums of it to pass on to their heirs.
Personally, I work because I enjoy it and am passionate about what I do. If I come out ahead and have money to survive and buy a few modest luxuries, then I'm happy.
If you don't like what you do and work is a pain, but you're addicted to the money stream, something is very wrong.
Similarly, having a society where people don't have the opportunity to better themselves is also wrong - and that's where government can and should attempt to improve the system.
It's a false dilemma to assert that only people who work excessively find purpose in work. Plenty of people at large companies enjoy and value their jobs. They just make reasonable delivery schedules and go home to their families at 5PM.
Sometimes is far from always, most people are not too excited about their job but they still wake up every morning to work. Most of them don't do extraordinary things, they do mundane and boring things which must be done to sustain the human race. They definitely do it for the money and no other reason. The few who make their hobby their main pursuit are few and far between and many time this hobby turns into their job.
Sure, that is the ideal, but not everyone will get that opportunity, and even those that do often work crappy jobs at some point or another. So, the point is, even if work sucks, you can still live a life worth living.
Except that many people don’t get into their profession as a mere means to an end. They chose the profession because they like it, and they want to spend their lives doing stuff they enjoy. Being employed just as means to an end is not worth the large amounts of time you spend doing it, if you can help it in any way. Let’s not normalize a dystopia here.
Why does someone's purpose in life defined by their job? What if someone wants to make music or art? Or pursue some kind of other field that doesn't pay particularly well. Why do all Americans think that the point of your life is to work at a job for a majority of it?
You know you're missing the point, right? There are some jobs that people just don't tend to enjoy or find meaningful. You can incentive people to do them by paying them lots of money, but that doesn't necessarily make people happy or fulfilled while doing the work, which was the original topic of this discussion.
In the real world, there aren't only great jobs and crap jobs. Most jobs are just jobs. Period. You put in work, you get paid. It's not horrible, it's not always great fun either, but it's neither awesome nor crap.
This is what most people do for a living. If you call that "stagnating" or "crap", you missed out half the point of the post: that the majority of people don't live to work, they work to live. They don't expect to get any fulfillment out of their job, they get it out of their life outside of work.
The idea that you cannot expect to get much out of life if you only put in 40 hours a week is bullshit that reduces the majority of the population to drones who's happiness is irrelevant.
They may well get that feeling outside of work. Maybe they like making music but couldn't make a living as a musician. Maybe they're writing a novel. Whatever it is. Most of the things most people in the world enjoy doing are not the things they are made to do for their job.
He doesn't view his job as something that determines his potential nor his worth, nor is this something necessary for life enjoyment as long as the job is tolerable. The hobbies and other such things makes him inherently happy. Not only that, but these things are much more constant than a simple job.
A job is just a job, however. A lot of people don't really like working at all. If he works at a factory, he's not doing anyone a favor by doing an already good job better - there are limits to what folks can do in that situation. He is, however, doing them a favor by having a work/life balance that makes him happy because it helps make his attitude better.
> Who wouldn't want to live and work in that world?
Who would want to? There are a lot of jobs in the real world that do work this way, and they are generally not the most desirable jobs. E.g. data entry or picking fruit or customer support or working on an assembly line.
The ability to improve, scale your work, and over time make a bigger impact with less effort is one of the key things that makes any kind of work interesting.
Not to mention a lot of the the most desirable jobs, like, say, professional athlete or movie star, tend to work very differently than what you're describing. Many people work very hard in those fields and never succeed, it's the combination of hard work and skill and a little bit of luck/randomness that makes it interesting.
Fundamentally, the price you pay from working a job in terms of time and energy lost will very rarely be worth it to the individual. There is a disconnect between the human mind, which has complex desires, and the place of any individual human in the world, where getting anything done requires either sacrifice or prior luck and your role is very small for the most part. For a job to be satisfying, it will either have to be something you'd do anyway (which is rare) or something where your contributions live up to the demands of your mind (which is even rarer)
Yeah, it's called a personal life. Work is basically that thing I do to make the stuff I do in my personal life possible or more comfortable. Or simply not starve. Would I rather have some sort of enjoyment in the work I do? Yeah, but the truth is I can be happy enough doing janitorial work or working retail so long as the work environment and pay is good enough. It is just a job, after all, even when the pay is good or it takes studying. While a few folks might hit the work/job lottery and get something they actually enjoy, I think work is just a job for most folks. It isn't cynical or jaded. It simply is.
Would I work if I won a lottery or if I didn't need money? Nope. Definitely not. I might have a few projects that look kinda like work if lottery-rich, but the truth is I'd just hire folks to do most of it for me. I'd mostly want to travel and make artwork and try out different sorts of hobbies. I'd work on getting weird and eccentric.
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