Why I Love Work and Hate Jobs

There’s a difference between work and a job. Self-employment is often the answer.

I love working. I don’t know if I’m unique in preferring work to entertainment, but I do. Work gives me a sense of satisfaction, a sense of achievement. At the end of my work day, I can look back and see that I’ve achieved something meaningful. It might be as simple as washing the dishes, but I still get a wonderful feeling that something good has been done. My life has moved forward in a positive manner.

I don’t like jobs. I don’t think I’ve ever been happy in a job in my life. I found jobs stressful, meaningless, often boring, filled with the strife of office politics, and a waste of my life.

Jobs are mostly about the necessity of earning money in order to survive financially. One does a job for someone else and they take up all the one’s time and energy in exchange for money that is insufficient to do the work one needs to in order to have a quality life.

Work is about doing something that has a direct impact on fixing up, inventing, or creating something that ensures not only one’s survival, but that does it in such a manner as to improve one’s quality of life and well being in such a way as to be meaningful.

Work and job appear to be the same thing, but they aren’t really. Work is something in which we are emotionally, intellectually, and physically involved in something we understand, want to do, and improves our own personal situation (and the situations of those we love) in a way that has direct benefits.

A job is generally something we’re doing for payment (in order to be able to do our own work), and do it and tolerate it and hate it and just want to go home and do the things that are meaningful to us. It’s no surprise that, internationally, depending on the country, somewhere between 75% and 95% of people hate their jobs.

Most human beings enjoy being the decision maker in their own lives. I would even go further than that and say it’s vital to mental health and well-being. None of us enjoys being told what to do by someone else, especially when the thing we are told to do doesn’t steer us towards the immediate goal that we are working towards in our own lives.

When we have to spend 40 hours a week doing a job in order to have the funds to do the work we want to do, it has taken up so much of our time and energy, that there is insufficient of it left to apply to the work that is so necessary for our own happiness.

All of this tremendous reservoir of unhappiness and stress in life has much to do with the economic system that we have evolved. Or rather the economic system that came about at the time of the industrial age.

An economic system comprises the the acts of production and distribution. There are many different types of economic system. In our world, the way we produce and distribute goods is through business. Business comprises ‘workers’ and ‘owners.’ More than that, business is not primarily a means of producing and distributing the goods we need and want. It’s more about making a profit for the owner. Even when the goods are not needed or wanted, then business makes sure that people will buy them anyway through a means of soft brainwashing (advertising). If you really think about it, would you really care about a particular brand if you hadn’t been convinced by advertising that it was the best on the market and you would gain recognition by being associated with it?

Perhaps it could work if business was more concerned about its impact on the greater good rather than its personal profit, but that’s not what is happening. From Wal-Mart through Amazon to all those millions of businesses — both big and small — the simple purpose is to make money for the owners. And somewhere in that mix, the pleasure of work has disappeared, and all it is is a job to the millions of people that are part or the work force.

I love doing many different forms of work. I love writing. I love decorating. I love systems — as an INTJ that is inevitable. In my early days, the best part of writing code was the systems analysis that preceded it. I love organisation. The best part of decorating and interior design was planning it — figuring out how it was all going to hang together. Yet, when I had to do this for other people, it became stressful — not enjoyable. It was only pleasurable when I was doing it for me, or immediate friends and family, or my community.

I have often wondered why that that was so.

I finally came to the conclusion it was about autonomy.

When I’m writing a story, I’m listening to a voice inside my head. I’m not being told what to write, how to write, and where to write. When I’m decorating and I’ve been given carte blanche, my inner self goes into a frenzy of creativity and production.

Yes, in the end if always comes back to autonomy — I make the decisions for my own life, and I do the work necessary to better myself and my own circumstances. That simply cannot be done when my time and energy is expended in the creation of wealth for someone else. The financial reward does not equate with the time spent doing a job.

So there you have it.

I love work.

I can’t bear jobs.

And here I am, some twenty five years later, still working, but no longer in a job. I am self-employed, doing the work I love.