Yeah, I think you’ve posted other stuff about your mindset on this issue. However, I do think that your attitude towards an easy, do nothing job is atypical. Probably highly atypical. Especially for a 50-something dude. Most of those people want nothing more to just coast. I admit there are exceptions, and clearly you are one, but I don’t think they are the norm.
Yeah I saw that. I did 2 full time jobs for a year. It was stressful. I couldn’t have done it for much longer.
OK, if more people like you start coming out of the woodwork I’m might need to rethink how rare people like you are.
My theory is that a lot of those people have never had easy do nothing jobs. They don’t know what they’re wishing for.
Either that or they hate what they do, so doing nothing is great.
Yeah, I think this is a big part of it.
I’m kinda privileged in that I have options and I don’t have kids to take care of and I can worry about things like whether or not my job is actually doing anything useful or if I’m challenged. Probably a ton of people would be very happy to just dick around all day and get paid.
I’ll probably get burned out within a year at my new job and wonder why I left, lol. Grass is always greener on the other side.
That probably has something to do with it. I also think it depends on where in your career you are. At some point (I think for most people it’s sometimes in their 50s) they’ve convinced themselves that they’ve done it all. There are no real challenges for them left. This may or may not be true, but that’s what they think. That’s when having a “job” has real appeal.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I was talking to my wife about this. My take is that a company is hiring me to so a job, characterized by completing certain tasks in certain time frames. They are not hiring me to work 40 hours a week regardless of what Im doing. Therefore, if one week I complete the required tasks in 18 hours as opposed to 40, then so be it. And it goes in the other direction as well. If a week is particularly busy and my tasks take me 60 hours, well thats part of the job. If Im awesome and can reduce the number of hours it takes to complete my tasks and I finish every week in 20 hours, well, then ive fulfilled my side of the agreement and those extra 20 hours are mine to do as I see fit with. Often Ill take that extra time to find ways to optimize my other tasks so I get MORE free time. But im getting my shit done. Anything else doesnt matter
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There’s a passage in Richard Feynman’s biography that has stuck with me for a very long time where he gets a case of what we today would call imposter syndrome and feels like he’s useless and spinning his wheels and doesn’t know why the university hired him. He concludes that if your boss hires you and you’re an incompetent clown, that’s basically your boss’s fault.
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Yeah this is why I never liked it when my boss would tell us all we could go home at 3pm on a holiday weekend. My feeling was “Look, you hired me to do a job. I’ll get that done, and come and go as I please.”
It’s like cat vs. dog. A dog is at your beck and call, even if what you tell him to do makes no sense. A cat is like, nah I’m not doing that, it’s stupid.
I stayed past midnight on NYE one year just because it felt good to work in the office with no one around, and I had something I wanted to work on. Also I had no plans obviously. But in the back of my mind was, “tell me to go home at 3pm, I’ll show you, look I’m still here at 2am.”
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There are two ways to have a do nothing job. One is you’re still expected to be present (mentally and/or physically), maybe you have sporadic simple tasks to complete throughout the day or you’re on call. Or it can be characterized by often having literally nothing to do. Your light task load is easily packaged into a few blocks where you get your work done and outside of that your time is entirely yours. I had a job that started as the first and transitioned to the second when a good manager realized it was a no cost way to make everyone much happier. The first way sucks, the second is awesome.
A thing you have to understand is that your brain is designed to make you feel bad about yourself and what you have accomplished no matter who you are. Literally one of the most brilliant scientists in human history was walking around CalTech feeling like a miserable failure and wondering why he was ever hired. Your brain is bad for you, just ignore that shit.
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This is such a good point. Do you think the asshole in bumblefuck USA who owns 25 McDonalds or a local
Car dealership worries about how he measures up? Absolutely not and that piece of shit is probably objectively happier than most people, just blissfully gliding through life.
You have to trick your brain into thinking you’re awesome, which, if you have the problem of constantly finding things to be disappointed by, or you worry about being a good person, you probably are relative to most people.
This is just a clearer way of describing what the science of happiness tells us about purpose and engagement. Those words have been ruined by vapid corporate dialogue, but the concepts are legitimate. People are happier (at work and at home) when they feel engaged with what they’re doing and when they feel like they have purpose. One giant mistake that companies are making is assigning managers the task of making their workers feel engaged and feel purpose, but I am pretty sure that is doomed to failure. Those good feelings are mostly self generated by people that have healthy habits around cultivating enthusiasm and gratitude and basically approaching work with very prosocial attitudes. When your boss tries to tell you that your work has purpose and why, most of the time it will sound like bullshit. When you regularly self motivate by intentionally focusing on the purpose of your work to you, then it becomes real.
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Feynman is a great example of the power of self driven enthusiasm. Another of his many great insights was that anything is interesting if you go into it deep enough. This is the kind of attitude the gives people purpose and engagement in their work. It’s a habit, an attitude, and a skill that resides in the individual. Feynman didn’t need a middle manager to give him an annual seminar and regular training on purpose and engagement.
I think the age comment here is highly relevant. If a person is 24 years old and find themselves in a job where they have nothing to do, they absolutely should bail. You may be getting a “free” paycheck for a year or two but the lack of development in those years will cost you way more of the subsequent decades in future earnings. When you are in your 20s your personal “human capital” (the present value of all your future earnings power) is your biggest asset. Letting that asset erode in a do nothing job will literally hurt you for your whole life.
As you say, people in their 50s are much more likely to be satisfied with a do nothing job. They are more likely to feel that they don’t need to improve their skill set anymore and can just be who they are for 10-15 years and then retire. That is rational, although there are plenty of horror stories out there about people that were laid off at age 57 without adequate retirement savings and with an irrelevant skill set so they couldn’t get another job. That’s an ugly reckoning in your late 50s that will end marriages.
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There are jobs which are important but can also feel trivial or pointless.
When I was a teenager, I accompanied my mom to her job in a travel company that was in the now gone NYC Twin Towers.
While I was there for the day, they paid me to box up brochures to send to the mom-and-pop travel agencies. After about 6 hours of this, I half-jokingly asked one of the junior executives if they had just given me busy work to keep me occupied.
He subtly gestured to one of the accountants and said “What you’re doing right now is more important than what he’s doing”
I think that every job seems pointless if you try to think about what the purpose is in the greater world. Even if you are a scientist trying to cure cancer, in theory you should always feel like you Have Purpose, but if you think about how much impact you’re having “in the grand scheme of things”, the answer is always going to come back as practically nothing.
People that actually do find purpose in their work usually find it on a smaller scale. Just the act of intentionally celebrating small wins and reflecting on the short term, small scale impact of your work on the people around you is more likely to promote feelings of engagement and purpose. In the grand scheme of things, the sun explodes and Earth is obliterated. It’s hard to conceive of your spreadsheets as purposeful in that context.
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Yeah this is true. I tend to view this like Marcellus Wallace
This is exactly my “problem” in a nutshell, when I think about taking the easy way, which I absolutely could.
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