Do What You Love or You Will Destroy Yourself
adamconrad.posterous.com
adamconrad.posterous.com
Right off the bat, try these on for size: Do What You Can Tolerate, And You'll Get By; Do Something You Hate If You Have To, Otherwise You'll Starve; Do Something You're Indifferent To But Pays The Bills, Or You Won't Be Able To Afford Anything; or, Do Whatever Comes Along And Have Fun In Your Free Time. Those are your writing assignments. 1000 words or less. Due tomorrow.
A healthy dose of realism would help the author along, as would taking the attention-whoring down a notch or two.
I spun into a soulless depression--working by day, working by night
And now the author is in his manic phase, which will also pass. Seriously, if you're in "soulless depression," don't change careers, get mental help.
Cognitive behavior therapists would call what the author is doing "awfulizing." He's making the consequences of a course of action out to be far worse than they really are, and working himself up over it. "Oh, it would be absolutely awful if I had to do X for a living!" Well, no. You could develop coping skills instead of insisting that everything has to be perfect in order for your life not to be awful.
Oh, well. It takes all kinds, I guess.
You make a great point here... as I lift the pistol to my mouth.
The illusion of desperate survival is so pervasive it spans all class lines. Most people would consider trading modern convenience for a little labor or discomfort(say, washing dishes manually, or lawn care) to be a fate equal to desperate poverty.
This entitlement is truly fear, and it motivates otherwise capable entrepreneurs into a life of bland wage slavery. When starvation is invoked as a warning here, it is truthfully in regard to modern privilege. A warning that the service and maintenance of modern life will fall on the misguided consumer. If they should choose to be self sufficient on small income, they will have to learn how. A fate apparently worse than starvation. Fear motivates this attitude.
Your comment seems to be a rationalization of your own job.
The author is positing that there are situations out there where you could love your 8 hours a day of work and the time after it. And that in most cases you can do this by refocusing on your minimal "needs" as opposed to the many "wants" that you feel due to a variety of pressures in life: "nice car", "big bank account", societal, status-symbols etc.
Also his post is aimed at technology professionals who love technology but just need to find the right situation. So it's much less riskier than changing fields but people still don't make the effort to find a better situation. And I've seen the very same thing happen.
Realism? He identified a false assumption and corrected it. How much more realistic can you get?
don't change careers, get mental help
What's mental help? Sounds like something we could all use.
Work is what we spend most of our waking hours doing, so work that sucks is life that sucks. That's not "awfulizing" - those consequences really are bad. There may be good reason to accept them for a while, but that path is fraught with risk, because (we've all seen examples of this) "a while" can so easily turn into decades, into a lifetime. When someone breaks out of that trance, we should all applaud.
The fact that you could write different articles, with different titles, arguing different points, does not imply that the contents of this article is 'drivel'. It shows there is a wide variety of valid arguments that support multiple ways of viewing and living your life. Which ones you find compelling, which ones you choose to accept, that is up to you.
Disagreeing with the arguments presented or the fact that there are alternatives you consider better supported are insufficient reason to call something 'drivel'.
Give someone without a viable skill set this advice, and watch them go to art school/form a talentless band/become an unemploued actor/rapper.
But yeah, fuck soul sucking jobs. I'm so bad at them, and they are so bad for me, I've sworn off them too.
"Do you have the ability to throw yourself against the currents of our culture and recognize that you are not the center of your life? The tasks and summonses are the center. Your happiness and your worth are a byproduct of how you engage them. Most of us are egotistical and most of us are self-concerned most of the time, but it’s nonetheless true that life comes to a point only when the self dissolves into some larger task and summons. The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself."
http://adamconrad.posterous.com/do-what-you-love-or-it-will-...
I do, however, have a second objection - it's not enough to enjoy what you do, and be good at what you do - you also have to be lucky. Good thing that being lucky is a skill.
"...Newbie drinkers of the 4-hour Kool-Aid don’t seem to get this. They think lifestyle design is a guaranteed path out of their crappy lives in cubicle prisons and the burden of the middle-class life script, mortgage and all. A question I recently answered on Quora very clearly reveals the mental model many people have: Is it hard to build, market and maintain a web app that makes at least $1000 a month? ...
You can tell an engineer asked this question even without reading further, because the question asks about how hard the work is. The gambler/marketer version of such questions is always how lucky do you have to be? The engineer asks about effort. The gambler/marketer asks about odds, and picks the game with the most favorable odds that he can find. 2/3 is better than 1/2. If I’d asked the question, I’d have phrased it as: how many apps do you have to publish in order to be fairly sure of having at least one hit that makes $1000 or more a month?"
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/06/02/the-las-vegas-rules-i-t...
In other words, perseverance and risk management are essential skills - ones that few people seek serious training and practice in, rather than lip service.
A bad job will kill you, but poor risk management will do it faster. People don't just need to hear that making the jump is good - they need to know what to expect when they do, and how to plan accordingly.
I would argue that for almost any entrepreneurial venture in the software space, odds calculations, and attempting to put forth something with any semblance of prediction beyond a few weeks post-launch is a waste of time.
It doesn't take rocket science skill to be realistic, and to anticipate known unknowns. You don't even need the complicated parts of excel.
This is one reason people should be allowed to spend their childhoods doing what they love rather than following someone else's curriculum for them. By the time they have to fend for themselves, they'll have a chance at having found something they love and which pays the bills.
You are thinking what it would have been like for you and the error you are making is forgetting that most kids are not like you were. Most kids don't end up as adults on Hacker News. When left alone, without being introduced to a wide variety of subjects, most kids would play games on the street with their friends, never take up a book and certainly never attempt to organize anything bigger than the next match against the kids of the next neighbourhood.
1) The more I love what I'm doing, the more I let it consume my life. My job cannot be my life.
2) The more I love something, the easier it is to burn out in 2-4 years.
If you find yourself doing something you really love, pace yourself and don't let it consume your life, and your love will live long.
People in the US and other technology-oriented areas of the world (I'll admit I'm completely ignorant) are amazingly lucky to enjoy a wide range of career choices. We get to choose a career. Certainly we can choose things that are more pleasant than others.
But to say everyone has the option to do "what they love" is not accurate. Do something you don't hate sure. Do something you enjoy maybe. Sometimes we can't do what we love.
I love driving my car really really fast (and do when I have a chance to) but there's no way I could make a career out of it. I also happen to love technology (not my job so much) so I'm lucky to work in a field that I enjoy.
I have been thinking lately though that I should try to go somewhere else where I will be "happier" - somewhere that will challenge me. In this aspect, I'm absolutely going to follow your advice.
For me, it was just learning to love in general. I needed to remember what it was like to love playing the guitar, to love spending time with my friends, and to love sitting down at the computer and cranking on code I enjoyed. Perhaps doing what you love means working a job that allows you to pursue all of your passions in your spare time. My hope is to share an experience so others don't hit rock bottom before they discover what they love to do in life.
The twist is that it may be true that you cannot survive doing some particular thing you love doing, it is has been my experience that you can find something you love to do that does in fact pay for your expenses.
The example "I love driving my car really really fast (and do when I have a chance to) but there's no way I could make a career out of it." is an interesting one, and to give you a flavor of how I think about these things.
Have you explored what it is about driving your car really really fast that triggers your happiness/reward center? Is it the inherent risk of losing control? Is it the rapid fire decision making? Is it the minimization of time between destinations? Is it some sense of freedom about being able to go anywhere ?
If you can get enough introspection into finding out what it is that you love about driving your car fast, it can lead you additional activities that you will also love.
My conjecture (and its just that) is that the base class of things that trigger our reward centers rapid enough or deeply enough cause us to 'love' doing them, is relatively finite with respect to the set 'all possible things you could do.'
Its worth spending some time thinking about because everyday you spend doing something that you don't love doing, is a day you will never get back.
It's worth considering how much first-world suffering is caused by the belief that we somehow deserve to be "happy".
I may come as a suprise that some, perhaps even many, people who live in a 'privileged' world are neither doing what they love nor are they happy. I don't believe my view is constrained by privilege, I certainly seek to understand bias in my own thinking and to eliminate it.
The claim, which is supported by the author of the cited article, is that better 'alignment' between what you love and what you are doing reduces stress and increases overall happiness. I believe that truth to be universal.
There are people who are enslaved and have no choice about what they do or how they live, there are people who have options. It doesn't change the principle.
"It's worth considering how much first-world suffering is caused by the belief that we somehow deserve to be 'happy'."
Historically the Catholic Church operated on the belief that we deserve to suffer.
The trick is throwing off externally imposed values on what you 'should' feel and figure out what you 'do' feel.
I found validation of that belief in the story acconrad tells of how he came to believe it.
In short, the only way to get these things in a job is in a professional sport, or maybe in the armed forces. Professional sporting is always an elite group, and fighter pilot's seats, the SEALS, and the Delta Force are similarly eclectic.
Danger - well all of the above have some amount of danger to them as well.
Quick - yup have that covered too.
So if one loved 'thrill, danger, speed' there are many activities you can do which have those attributes, and it is my claim that if can the financials work where most of your time is doing something you love then you will be happier overall.
The fastest thing on water is a Kiteboard. In high winds it has everything you described above - but it is plenty dangerous too so be careful. It's something I intensely love to do.
You'll live on the prettiest beaches in the world, meet beautiful women, be in great shape but you won't have money. And from what I've seen, most people who have this lifestyle are VERY happy.