As people get older, they often come to realize that any job that puts a roof over ones head, food on the table, and allows quality time with friends and family, is meaningful work.
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If they have to choose between a meaningless job and starvation?
Cool. Now grow up and do some meaningful with your time. And so should I.
Maybe it’s an age gap thing, but I’ve come to realize this attitude is one many boomers have because they’re all doing ok. The rest of us need to course correct the mess they’ve left. The america they were born into might as well be a foreign country at this point.
The real problem with meaningless work is it tends to be incredibly stressful. Because the underlying work creates no value, even locally (existentially of course it's all nil, but again, this isn't about that level of abstraction). The trouble with "no value" is that you also have no way know how to or even if you are doing your job "well".
Your description sounds pleasant, but my real experience with meaningless work is that it results in long hours worked, very aggressive office politics, and consistent insecurity around the future of your job and income.
The essence of "meaningless work" is captured very well in Kafka's The Trial. While their are brief moments where one can laugh at the absurdity of the situation, most of the time it sits in exact confrontation to the idyllic view of work you are proposing.
No further comment is needed.
I don't agree with the author's standpoint but I can kinda understand it but their passive aggression on the parent comment was just not needed and this clever way of saying it was kinda cool. I learnt something new to say but I am not sure how many ways it would be viable to say this
Any other quotes like this that you might want to share?
>"In a system where, as Gorz puts it, “we produce nothing of what we consume, and consume nothing of what we produce,” it is up to each and every one of us, connecting with others as a collective mass, to regain control over the meaning of work and over the determination of the needs that legitimize it. This is also the way for us to question the disastrous impact that the economy is having on the environment through its blind logic of profit and growth."
ChatGPT has lifted Latin putdowns from the province of Harvard classics major to computer programmers.
I have volunteered at the foodbank and with the homeless. I got paid nothing, but it had an effect on the world that aligned with my values and provdided meaning, but it was effectively useless for me.
As a random example of this kind of thing: I saw a manager spend a month manually tallying up the disk usage on a fully virtualised storage array… VM by VM, volume by volume. Not realising that as a consequence of the layers abstractions, the resulting numbers will be totally meaningless. I.e.: an empty 2 TB volume might need only a couple of gigabytes on the array… or the full 2 TB if someone had accidentally “full” formatted it… except that deduplication was enabled across volumes, so… who knows!?
The only number that mattered was the post-dedup allocated block count which the storage array conveniently provided on the status screen. At the time it was 1%, which translates to “don’t worry about it”.
He worried about it. Spent weeks and weeks with Excel tallying up the total, getting nonsense, trying again, over and over.
You see, two decades earlier, storage arrays didn’t dedup, VMware was not a thing, and there wasn’t a nice neat little percentage that they array itself could report. You had to tally up each volume in each server, it was the only way. So a policy was written that it’s someone’s job to go do this every six months or whatever.
So this guy followed the policy. He tallied things up.
Like a meat robot following the last instruction left by a deceased master.
It was depressing to watch.
Hacker: That's not the point. Look at Latin. Hardly anybody knows that now.
Humphrey: Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.
Hacker: What?
Humphrey: Times change and we change with the times.
Hacker: Precisely.
Humphrey: Si tacuisses, philosophus manisses.
Hacker: What does that mean?
Humphrey: If you'd kept your mouth shut, we might have thought you were clever.
Hacker: I beg your pardon?
Humphrey: Not you, Prime Minister. That's the translation.
> ChatGPT has lifted Latin putdowns from the province of Harvard classics major to computer programmers.
I take issue with your implication that software developers can't have other interests. What a fucking narrow minded view of the world your must have.
I hope you're not the one that downvoted me, since your complaint isn't about what I said.