You Have to Feel It

Plenty of people work at large corporations and enjoy their work.

Plenty of people are certifiable

“Enjoy their paycheck”, there - fixed it for you

When you do the math, it looks like most jobs have never actually had an enjoyable paycheck though, just the fortunate few.

In that case some peole are bound to find more enjoyment from something else, or why would the paycheck even be worth it?

Sometimes that can occur within the very work they do, maybe even their life's work, which can take long enough to proceed through phases of education, underemployment, business ownership, retirement and back again.

Surely there are other kinds of enjoyment continuity, which can function in parallel to a certain extent, that those concentrating on the paycheck alone may not come close to achieving.

And how

Nope. Sure scale comes with lots of communication and coordination overhead that many people don't enjoy, but middle management exists to provide a place to dump all that annoying stuff.

Surely we can have a better discussion on this topic than "everyone who disagrees with me is insane".

It seems like you're trying to tell me that I don't actually enjoy my work? That seems observably untrue from my perspective? If you don't enjoy your work, that's fine, but trying to tell people who do that they actually don't doesn't make any sense to me.

Whenever someone claims to enjoy or love their job, I'm extremely suspicious. Usually it's some form of cope, because without it how could you stand having to work 8+ hours a day for 40 years? Easier to tell yourself you actually love it. I'm sure you enjoy aspects of your work. But I would guess if you won $100m you wouldn't keep going. If you truly enjoyed it, you would do it for free.

And to create even more of it, as they often revel in this, as it makes them seem more important, indispensable.

Dismissing anyone who isn't already aligned with your world view as "just cope" seems an unproductive strategy to having a discussion.

If I won 100M, I wouldn't work the exact same job - I'd probably move into an adjacent role that was more ambitious and took on a lot more risk, because I would be a lot less concerned if the company I was working for crashed and burned. The outlines of my role would stay the same.

I feel I've been clear-headed about my feelings about work. It took a lot of thinking to get to a place I enjoy. I haven't always enjoyed my work; I've worked at places that I hated and places that were just meh. But yeah, my current work is awesome, I happily do it nights and weekends just for fun (much to the chagrin of my girlfriend). Most people I work with, and most friends I have outside of work, feel similarly. I'm sorry you don't feel the same, but I encourage you to think before telling other people they feel a different way than they actually do.

Truly, to each their own.

I couldn't bear to pour all my energy in something that, ultimately, is not mine. But I could feel your enthusiasm through your post, which made me a bit jealouse.

So, yeah.

Sorry, thought we were doing platitudes

I guess there is a type of personality that don't need autonomy and are totally fine being a small cog in a giant machine, and only get a sliver of the benefit. I knew day one I started working that I'm not like that, and it's difficult for me to comprehend that people truly enjoy it.