June 12, 2021

Work vs Fun, Sweet Tooth

In the 30+ years after college I’ve spent in graduate school and at work, I have heard one sentence repeatedly: “Not everyone can do the work they love.” I’ve always found that fascinating. It implies all sorts of things. That work can be boring and jobs unpleasant. That some of us have no choice but to do such jobs. Sure, there are real examples of such jobs but they are far and few in between. I can imagine being forcibly drafted into the army and being shipped off to a foreign land as an example of choiceless and extremely unpleasant work. Another example that comes to mind is of a domestic servant in a developing country. (This category of work has largely disappeared in rich countries. Interestingly, some consider the availability of domestic servants as a perk of living in a less developed country.)

Most jobs simply won’t exist if they are unpleasant in every way imaginable and there is no one willing to do them. They would be automated or simply go undone. If no one wants to collect garbage on Mondays, trust me, we will be carrying garbage to landfills ourselves. So, while there may be some jobs that fall into the category of “someone’s got to do them,” there is a chance anyone saying that about any job is mistaken. Most jobs have at least one redeeming aspect to them, which make them worthwhile to someone or the other.

At the other end of the spectrum, we say even more fascinating lies: “Having a job is not about having fun.” We hear this fairly early in our lives. We are told to stop playing and start our homeworks, creating an indelible, lifelong impression that the two are antithetical in nature. “I love what I do,” is another lie that is repeated often in social settings. To say otherwise is considered socially unacceptable, a sign of quirkiness, or even a symptom of failure. No successful person is expected to say that their work is anything but interesting. Almost never do we hear, “I know that I am the CEO of Google but this job really sucks.” What most successful people really mean is, “Look, I couldn’t have bought a decent sized home in a nice neighborhood. Also, it has a fair amount of prestige attached to it. They let me fly business class and stay in fancy hotels. I have lost track of what I am doing, or whether it’s useful, interesting etc. I don’t mean to sound like an ingrate but the job sucks. But, I can’t afford to diss it in public. I’ve got onto this train and I’ve got to keep things going.”

A lot of statements we make about work or even life are statements of intent. They are not statements of fact. The most common mistake we make in analyzing these things is to contaminate what we want with what is possible. It’s undoubtedly hard to find work that we will love. It’s hard to succeed at work we don’t love. In fact, most of us don’t “succeed.” Only a few, who manage to find opiates to obfuscate their boredom, break through to success. There are plenty of opiates - power, status, money - in the system for the taking. Don’t feel bad if you didn’t succeed. In fact, if you had admitted your discontent to yourself at some point, I’d say that’s more success than most achieve in their lifetimes. If you’re surrounded by people who claim to enjoy the work you find not so interesting, chances are they are lying and you’re not. Not always, but most of the time.

Work and play have been set up as antagonists in life’s drama. Most of us keep these two apart. Most of my colleagues are highly trained professionals and very competent. They are also deadly serious. I think this is a uniquely American curse. I have worked in a few other countries but I have not seen such intensity there as I’ve seen in America. It unnerves and comforts me alternately. I am glad that we take our commitments seriously but I worry for us.

Truth, as always, lies in the middle. Most of us don't hate our jobs but we’d rather be doing something else. The apocryphal Wall Street bond trader or the criminal lawyer always sets out to earn his first ten million dollars before embarking on the great American novel or social justice.

Here’s the thing: If I were to offer a random person on the street a million dollars... wait, let’s make it ten or fifty million dollars... and ask them to figure out what they want to do, most of them will fail to figure it out in their lifetimes. It’s a hard problem to solve. If you remove people’s constraints, they usually have no idea what to do next. I ask this question at work all the time. “What if we had unlimited money and time? What would we do?” It usually stumps the room. What we are doing most of the time is solving for constraints. We don’t really know what we want to do. Most people’s lives fall apart when they win the lottery.

Life’s constraints give it structure and boundaries and keep us moving. Work can be a wonderful way to structure one’s life until we figure out what to do with life. Only if we don’t get enmeshed in its trappings of power, prestige, and money. It would be a tragedy if we are irretrievably trapped by the time we have figured things out.

The happiest people are not those who are financially emancipated but those who know what they want to do. It’s a important, non-intuitive insight that increasingly occupies my mind as I stand on the runway and look ahead at the clearly visible horizon of my career.

We recently finished watching Season 1 of “Sweet Tooth,” on Netflix. It’s brilliantly made and storytelling at its best. It’s about a devastating virus that drives people into hiding, makes them distrust each other, causes them to operate from a place of fear, but, builds beautiful relationships along the way. The show started filming pre-Covid but in it, we can find resonance to our present circumstances. It starts by being about isolation, fear and grief but soars effortlessly into the joys of finding unexpected connections that can end up defining our lives. I won’t say more and will let you discover it for yourself. I can’t wait for S2. Two thumbs up.

Stay safe. Have a wonderful week ahead.