(2022-01-17) Maciver Fulfilling Work

David R MacIver: Fulfilling work. There's a thing I've noticed on and off which is that people who have never worked, in some generalisable sense, are weird, in a way that I do not intend to be as complimentary.

My central example of someone like this is not someone on unemployment benefits, but a trust fund kid. People who are rich enough that their life hasn't ever really required them to work for things

there's something that feels very dysfunctional about them - a sort of purposelessness and failure to engage with the actual reality of the world, or their relations with other people, because they have never really had to test themselves against the former and have always had the resources to avoid relying on the latter.

This is a problem that, to some degree, I can relate to, and feel like I'm struggling with a bit myself.

there are aspects of employemnt (DayJob) I miss a great deal, even if there are other aspects that I do not miss at all.

To me it feels like there's some sort of central human experience which has all of the following components...

Possibly this list isn't sufficient, but it all seems necessary to be an example of the thing I'm pointing to, which one might as well call something like "fulfilling work". (cf Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose)

For me the optimal examples of such things are research and development, but they don't have to be. Renovating a house or working in a garden, for example. Hosting an event to some degree counts

I think many people have roughly zero experiences like this in their life, but their job is the thing that comes closest. Some people even have this in their jobs, although I think it's not the norm.

Certainly, jobs being fulfilling work is not my experience - my jobs have all failed on (4),

It was also a bit lacking in (6) - generally the end result wasn't bottlenecked on how well I fulfilled my role because the nature of working at startups is that the thing that will kill you is whether or not the people with power are competent to run a company and choose a product direction. Spoiler: They usually aren't.

Yesterday's post was partly me coming to terms with the fact that hobbies and personal interests also don't fill this role, and the other people are a necessary part of it.

I feel like the thing that is missing from both the pro and anti work discourse is that the sort of work you need is not just any work but fulfilling work, and that much of what people experience at work is a cruel caricature of that experience.