
The key to loving your job in the age of burnout - rohmanhakim
https://qz.com/work/1571065/how-to-love-your-job-and-avoid-burnout/
======
keiferski
It seems to me that a lot of contemporary burnout stems from the extremely
abstract nature of the modern economy.

During and after college, I spent 4-5 years working at a bakery. The pay was
poor, the hours worse, customers irritating, and career advancement non-
existent. And yet, I got to make hundreds of real, physical objects every day,
entirely from scratch, and then see people enjoy them. That sort of instant
feedback made all the scrubbing, mopping, and change-counting bearable, at
least in an obvious cause-effect sense. This counter is covered in flour
because I was baking these loaves of bread all day.

Compare this to the average office job. For the most part, the end product of
a week's or month's work is essentially a bunch of text on a screen. Take a
writer, for example. In the past, a journalist or writer would have some
physical remnants and products of their work - the notes and manuscripts for
their articles and then the final published piece in a newspaper or physical
book. Today, they have...a collection of blog posts and internet articles. The
physicality of the work has evaporated entirely.

I don't really know if this is a solvable problem in the near future, but I
hope that the digital economy takes a turn back towards some sense of
physicality.

~~~
alphamale619
"burnout stems from the extremely abstract nature of the modern economy."

That is incorrect. According to research, burnout steams not from the work,
but from the pressure to complete the work, and the consequences of not
completing the work.

Almost every job in the private sector is "At-will" employment. Meaning you
can be fired for any work related reason. Not finishing an assignment? Poor
performance? etc, you are at risk of being fired.

That pressure to constantly perform under pressure is what causes burnout. You
baking is not a pressure packed job, you are following a simple procedure that
requires little to no thinking at all.

If you were threatened or worked "under the gun"at the bakery, I gurantee you
would burnout.

~~~
tomjakubowski
> According to research, burnout steams not from the work, but from the
> pressure to complete the work, and the consequences of not completing the
> work.

> You baking is not a pressure packed job, you are following a simple
> procedure that requires little to no thinking at all.

What? A job that "requires little to no thinking at all" can nonetheless
include a strong pressure to perform or get fired, which is what you say
causes burnout.

~~~
tqkxzugoaupvwqr
He says so in his last paragraph.

------
dalbasal
Besides inherent meaning in the work itself (like zookeeping) I think the
information economy is just structurally stressful... when you look decades
ahead.

Career progression can feel like an up-or-out pyramid. Many devs feel (rightly
or wrongly) like they need to progress to super-dev or manager by 35, because
who's going to hire a 40 to engineer, especially when the tech stack/tools get
a reset every 5 years.

..and devs have it good, ATM. High demand, at least some respect for
experience. Who's hiring a 49 year old social media ambassador? Will the
arcane understanding of azure enterprise pricing and configuration that keeps
you employed today get you employed in 2025? How about agile expertise?

I think people look at their jobs, and just can't see a safe path to
retirement at 66. The job, or the company won't exist by then.

It's stressful.

My grandad was a farmer and builder. _His_ father and brothers were farmer-
tradesmen too. By 30 he had acquired some land, stock, a light truck and tools
for the contracting business. He raised cattle and built houses until
retirement (when he traded building for running a BnB, and still farmed a
little).

The point is that people expected their career to have long term legs. A lot
of the new information economy feels very fleeting, by comparison.

Meanwhile most of us have fathers, aunts or whatnot that found themselves
unemployed in their 50s after a promising-seeming 40s. Travel agents when
Expedia happened. Programmers when the dot-com bust happened... real estators
when that happened, Greek civil servants when Greece went bust...

~~~
ken
> Who's hiring a 49 year old social media ambassador?

I think the demand for this is actually going to be huge in the future. There
are getting to be a lot of older people who grew up with computers, and have a
massive amount of purchasing power. A twentysomething is probably not going to
be the right person to reach them.

~~~
dalbasal
I agree that a lot of this is perception, and the "young man's game"
assumption is largely false, just driven by meaningless demographic trends
(not as many people started coding in 1980 as in 2010, so there are
proportionally few old programmers.

I'm talking about a larger feeling. The industry is ethereal. The companies
and jobs in the 2039 information economy will be very different. Sure, it's
possible to keep up. But, it may not be easy. In a lot of cases, you can
probably expect the rug to be pulled out.

I agree that a talented engineer will probably be in demand. But that's just a
small portion of people.

Compare this to bookkeeping, welding, lawyering, nursing...

An average 35 year old nurse (or most people working in a hospital long term)
can imagine themselves continuing on some relatively uneventful path for
another 30 years. An average employee at Uber? A lot less so.

..and most people work at much less prestigious companies than Uber.

------
alxlaz
There's an advice that I tend to give to my younger colleagues who ask about
this stuff: love your _profession_ , not your job.

I love my profession -- I wanted to be an engineer for as long as I can
remember. But that doesn't mean I loved every engineering _job_ I've ever
held. If a job makes you dislike what you do to the point where you stop
cultivating your abilities, I think you should leave it as soon as you can.

~~~
gerbilly
Whenever I get too worked up about how decisions are made in my group, I like
to think of all the IT departments there are in my city, in the world even.

I don't care about what decisions are being made in those places, so I
shouldn't get too worked up about decisions being made where I work either.

If, after giving my recommendations, and making my arguments, people still
decide to do risky dumb things with infrastructure, I don't let it bother me
anymore.

~~~
mvindahl
At one time I was contracting at a place where every process was broken, from
IT to management to testing. It wasn't really a place that attracted talented
developers. There were a some developers that were talented and a lot which
were mediocre or had given up along the way. Development progressed at the
pace of syrup. They paid on time, though.

Anyway, being a professional, I put in my hours and did my best to contribute
until the contract ran out. But I also stuck a post-it note to the bottom of
my screen with my all-time favourite Polish phrase: "Nie mój cyrk, nie moje
małpy". Literally: "Not my circus, not my monkeys.". I.e. the inherent
brokenness wasn't my problem to fix.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
It's a much easier to remain detached when you are a contractor, you just need
to remember you won't be there in a month or two.

~~~
maxxxxx
When I was contractor and had to sit through stupid meetings I always looked
at my watch and thought "Here is another $20, here is another" and so on. It's
cynical but makes it much more bearable.

------
msluyter
I wish I could articulate precisely what -- a the age of ___cough cough_ __-
something -- has kept me engaged and happy as a software developer. In part, I
've been lucky. I've mostly had decent jobs and companies that treated
employees humanely. Partly, I feel that I keep improving at what I do, and
that alone is somewhat satisfying. Partly, I just like thinking and solving
puzzles, which pretty much describes actual coding.

Contrast that to my wife, who, despite having a degree from a top ivy league
school, seems to have hated every job she's ever had and would drop it all to
retire in an instant if she could afford it.

I will note that I also have had the luxury of exploring the "do what you
love" career theory. Out of high school, I wanted to be an orchestral
musician, and spent like 12 years pursuing that path before realizing that it
wasn't going to work out. So I sort of had to reset my brain to understand
that I didn't have to do _this one thing_ to be happy. So I'm not sitting here
in a cubicle thinking "if only...." because I've done the "if only." (Not
having other options is actually a surprisingly effective route to happiness.
(See: Stumbling on Happiness)).

Another great book related to this topic is "How to Want What You Have."

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/933037.How_to_Want_What_...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/933037.How_to_Want_What_You_Have)

~~~
mttyng
I've followed a similar path as you. I was a late-bloomer, academically. Just
sorta bounced around until my mid-twenties when I got bored/depressed (or did
I simply realize I would be miserable later in life?) with what I was doing in
my minimum-wage jobs. I somehow got interested in Physics, put myself back
into school, at which point I became incredibly interested in Software
Development during an internship my Junior year and the rest is a standard
Tech Industry story.

I work really long hours, not because I feel some need to satisfy my corporate
overlords or because I have too much to do, but simply because I find it fun.
I'm sure most everyone here can relate, but that feeling of banging your head
against a wall for (x-amount of time) and then suddenly nailing a solution is
exhilarating. I don't think that I can hit burnout with that, but maybe I'm
wrong.

I see two things with this:

1) I (and this cannot be stressed enough) got _really_ lucky having an
inherent interest in something that also aligned with a market need.

2) In the course of "bouncing around" in my late-teens and early-twenties I
had a lot of time to ruminate (consciously or not) on who I was and what I
wanted with life. This isn't some profound thing I'll say and I've certainly
seen it echoed here before, but pushing young people (let's be real... they're
kids) to make an extremely costly decision that will impact the entirety of
their life without knowing who they even are is...crazy.

Like you, I'll contrast that with my wife: High School -> SATs -> college
application process -> enter a curriculum for (insert here) -> graduate -> get
a job (not even in your mid-twenties yet). Maybe some people do know who they
are at an early age, but I'd wager most people don't really know themselves
until ~25.

And now, here you are, coming to terms with yourself after having invested
god-knows-how-much money and four years into something you'll likely evolve
out of, but still needing to put in the hours to make ends meet and climb the
ladder (we all want to be middle management, right?). The key to loving your
job in the age of burnout is to not take your job until you know who you are.
And even then your interests may not even align with an economic need. So what
do you do? Especially when you need to feed yourself and, potentially, your
family. It seems to me that finding a career that you like and that feels like
fun, rather than work, is a total crap shoot. Sort of like a romantic
relationship. Ideally, you want a partner that grows with you, but as we all
know that's hard to predict because people change at varying rates or not at
all.

TL;DR: If you're (really really) lucky and happen to fall into a career path
that grows with you, you might not experience burnout

~~~
strikelaserclaw
You are absolutely right. I wish what you did becomes the norm in the future
for most kids. Having to make a decision like college at 18 is absolutely nuts
for most kids.

------
cvoss
> "But with the rise of Protestantism, work was ennobled. Martin Luther for
> the first time suggested that an individual’s work—whether it was making
> shoes or building churches—could be a way of serving God, and that the
> harder we worked (and, by default, the more money we made), the better God
> would be pleased.

> "That Protestant work ethic dominates in the US to a greater degree than
> almost anywhere else because it is a relatively young country without a
> long, prevalent pre-Protestant history..."

I've heard this theory of the protestant work ethic many times very recently.
I grew up in what I think was a very typical American protestant culture,
where, yes, work is ennobled ("all work is a high calling, not just clerical
work") but I have never encountered this sentiment to the workaholic extreme
that is being associated to it. Just the opposite was true: a huge emphasis
was placed on the Sabbath commandment. Not in the legalistic, "it's a sin if
you work on Sundays" kind of way, but definitely in the work-life balance,
burnout-avoiding kind of way. Sabbath rest has always been centrally important
to the brand of protestant work ethic that I came up in. Curious if others
have different experiences?

~~~
framebit
IMO the Protestant work ethic, while it has its roots in the ennobling of work
in service to God, quickly got twisted through the Puritans and their
adherence to "working out your salvation" rather than "for it is by grace you
have been saved, through faith, not by works so that no one can boast." Even
if that wasn't the official theology, that's certainly the behavioral
tradition. And this quickly got twisted into the fundamental American myth:
you get what you deserve.

Are you wealthy? Then you must have worked hard. Are you poor? Then you must
be lazy. Did participating in an essential oils MLM bankrupt your family? You
just didn't want success enough.

So the protestant work ethic in a modern sense, (IMO, of course) is ennobling
work BECAUSE your "righteousness" for whatever religious or non-religious
definition you want to use is based in your hardworkingness.

~~~
whatshisface
> _Did participating in an essential oils MLM bankrupt your family? You just
> didn 't want success enough._

That's not about work, that's about money. There's definitely no way to blame
money-equals-virtue on Protestantism... That's just human nature.

~~~
framebit
Exactly right, it's a human nature twist on misinterpreted Protestant
theology. Or rather a human instinct dressed up with the language of religion,
in this case Protestantism but it could be anything. The manipulative language
of MLMs which make money off the failures of their consultants, pulls from
this work = salvation misinterpretation that boils down to "you get what you
deserve," which is completely at odds with _real_ Protestant (and Catholic,
orthodox, other Christian) theology.

~~~
whatshisface
> _you get what you deserve_

Ironically, this belief is honestly held by many con artists, who placate
their conscience by telling themselves that whoever is stupid "deserves" to be
scammed.

------
esotericn
Seems intuitively obvious to me to the point of being a fluff piece.

The article is effectively saying that if your job needs to not be pointless
in order for you to do it.

If you go to work every day, don't achieve anything in the wider world, don't
save for the future, don't have any plans in general, then you're going to
have a bad time.

That's a completely natural response to, well, wasting your entire life if
left unchecked.

You can be paid very little but if it allows you to support your family that
can be fulfilling.

~~~
perfunctory
> The article is effectively saying that if your job needs to not be
> pointless...

What the article is also saying - work less. And this is not so obvious I
assume for most readers.

~~~
agumonkey
balance in life is a skill hard to acquire

~~~
pojzon
After 6 years of egineering, ive had to stop and start to learn this skill. I
lost the ability to rest without thinking about what i could be doing now..

Having a good life/work balance is very hard in modern age. Team hates you
because each time you have to go out to LIVE, they feel like they have to do
your job too.. Feeling guilty also sux. But what can you do.

------
bambax
There's something overlooked about zookeepers and many other professions: it's
done _outside_. Being outside, directly under the sun, makes us happy,
regardless of weather or temperature. I don't think one can be happy being
inside all of the time (inside the home, the car, the office, the gym, the
mall...)

I see trash collectors every day, singing while doing their job. It's one of
the least considered occupation, and maybe least enviable. Yet if we ever saw
an office worker sing, we'd think they'd gone crazy.

I think we need to find a way to put a little more Nature in office jobs.

~~~
elindbe2
This is so true. Every time there's a nice sunny workday, I'm looking out the
window thinking "wtf am I doing in here?". In fact, I think it's possible that
many of our feelings of anomie and meaninglessness at work could be a
misinterpretation our bodies' signal that says: "hey you! get out of this cave
and go gather some berries!"

------
RickJWagner
"At the same time, we’re brought up to believe that work—not the church, the
state, or even the family—is the fountainhead from which our sense of meaning
should spring."

And therein lies the problem. Ask someone who's recently retired.

------
dontbenebby
The key to loving your job is to remember it is _a job_. While not all jobs
are fun, it's likely most HN posters have it a lot better than say, a
construction worker. By all means, try to find work you find
interesting/exciting, but I think you set yourself up for failure and sadness
if you expect the same level of joy from paid work that you will get from your
hobbies.

------
peterwwillis
My friends with 3 jobs don't get burnout. They work the hours they're
scheduled (or get paid overtime). You perform tasks for a few hours (sometimes
very long hours), but then you're done for the day, and the next day you start
anew. Some days are worse than others, but in general, work doesn't pile up;
you just do what you can each day. The work isn't "carried over" into
subsequent days or weeks.

Office work feels more like pushing a boulder uphill, and if you don't make
enough progress, the hill's incline seems to get steeper.

------
malvosenior
I find that the key to me loving my job is: working remotely. Doesn't really
matter what the company does, if I have to commute and go to an open office
floor plan, I'm not happy.

~~~
Insanity
Working remotely, part of the time, sure.

I do like the interaction with people that I get at my job. It's not entirely
the same over slack, but that might be because the people whom I work with
tend to be more "in-person people".

Apart from that, I also like that going to the office gives me a chance to go
outside, if I'd work remotely.. I'd probably only go outside a few days a
week.

OTOH, open floor plans and commuting does suck. And I'm happy (and more
productive) the days that I do work from home.

------
taffronaut
Hill farming sheep has no career progression, every year is the same brutal
sequence, and you're at the mercy of whatever meagre prices the market sets
for meat and fleeces. The tangible outputs vs office work does not seem
sufficient compensation in many cases.
[http://www.farmbusiness.co.uk/news/more-then-one-farmer-a-
we...](http://www.farmbusiness.co.uk/news/more-then-one-farmer-a-week-in-the-
uk-dies-by-suicide-2.html)

------
perfunctory
"For most of human history, work was a drudgery to be borne by those people
who had to do it, and avoided by those who could afford to. From ancient
Greece to medieval Europe, toil was seen as a necessary evil, and mainly as a
misfortune of the poor. "

Human history starts waaay before ancient Greece.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Hunter-
gatherer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Hunter-gatherer)

~~~
pjc50
Human life, yes. History? Not so much. Possibly the only hunter-gatherer
civilization we have more than fragments of history from are the Australian
Aborigines. This makes it very hard to ask anthropological questions of the
past about how people felt about their work.

~~~
cimmanom
Ancient India, ancient China, ancient Egypt, and ancient Mesopotamia are all
civilizations with far older histories (with meaningful archaeological remains
and in many cases written records) than ancient Greece. Greece is just where
many Euro-centric historical perspectives begin.

------
gaze
How about that it's just as simple as burnout being a problem of employers
asking too much from their employees?

------
sametmax
Again an advice without applicable steps. We have so many insights on how we
work, and so few practical way of using them.

~~~
beat
There's an easy, applicable step... don't have a bullshit job. Unfortunately,
bullshit jobs tend to pay better. That's because without the money, no one
would do them.

~~~
sametmax
I don't, and it's nowhere from the solution.

------
tvh
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36531574-bullshit-
jobs](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36531574-bullshit-jobs)

------
scarejunba
The key for me was working less. Much happier now.

------
paulcole
My key takeaway is that I should pay my employees less and make them pick up
more feces.

------
musicale
Summary:

This article suggests that the "key" to making a horrible modern job slightly
less intolerable is: slacking off as much as possible (or at the very least
lowering the priority of work in your life as much as you can) and being very
blatant about it so that everyone else is encouraged to follow your example.
;-)

------
papermill
Why should anyone love their job? You should love your family and friends, not
your job.

I guess it'll be ideal if you could enjoy your job, but it's insane to love
it. Besides, most people have a job to survive and eventually retire ( not
have job ).

I wonder when and where the idea of loving your job came about.

~~~
lm28469
It's the #1 time consuming thing in your life. You spend most of the day doing
it, for most of your life.

It's not the 1800s anymore.

"Unfortunately for these neo-economist thinkers, these proofs belong to the
nineteenth century, a time when the misery of the working classes made the
right to work the counterpart of the right to be a slave, claimed at the dawn
of time by prisoners about to be massacred. Above all it was a question of
surviving, of not disappearing physically. The imperatives of production are
the imperatives of survival; from now on, people want to live, not just to
survive." \- Raoul Vaneigem

------
qwsxyh
I think it's pretty sad the concept of loving your job even exists.

~~~
sgillen
Why? Do you see it as a way to fool people into working harder against their
own best interests?

I think there are people who genuinely love their job and I think that's OK.

