LOVE YOUR JOB!

("In every job that must be done there is an element of fun" (M. Poppins))

Work.

When I was a child and people asked me "what kind of job do you want to do when you grow up?" I thought to myself "what? I've got a choice? I don't think so!". In general most people don't have a choice. (Even the idea that you might have a choice is historically a very recent one.)

But there is an interesting question here which is: if you did have a choice then what would you look for in your "dream job"? In other words: what kinds of work are desirable and why?

The question.

Certainly intrinsic enjoyment could be one answer. Your dream job would be doing something that was pleasurable. For example if you like eating nice food and if your job was reviewing restaurant meals then your job would give you the intrinsic pleasure of eating. But it wouldn't be 100% pleasure of course. You'd have to sit down and write a review later which might not be as much fun.

But somehow it doesn't seem right to include intrinsic enjoyment in deciding the desirability of a job. Because intrinsic enjoyment determines the desirability of anything. When people say they like working surely they don't mean that they like it in the sense that they like drinking coffee or watching television. I'm more interested in what in particular makes that thing called 'work' specifically desirable. Not what makes things in general desirable which is a different question. In other words what is that thing that is called "job satisfaction".

The question again.

An alternative way the above question presents itself to my mind is: at the point at which you are doing your job (whatever that might be) what is your motivation to be doing it? Sometimes I ask myself this while I am working at my job. I don't ask the question in the sense of doubting that I do have some motivation. Because I certainly do have motivation to do it, otherwise I wouldn't be doing it. But it's like it's not clear to me what that motivation is. And, actually, sometimes my motivation reduces and I think: how can I increase it to be more productive? Or sometimes it feels like I have the wrong sort of motivation and that there might be a better sort.

If the activity of working was like eating. I mean in the sense that it was giving me some intrinsic pleasure. Then the motivation would be clear. But work very rarely yields any sort of intrinsic and immediate enjoyment. So what is the best sort of motivation behind work?

Attitude.

So I guess my question is about my 'attitude' to the work that I am doing. At a micro-level. So at the point at which I'm doing something. I could be thinking: "I can't wait for this to be over, I wish I was doing something else, this is so unpleasant! To me it's a burden or a tiresome chore that has to be endured. And my motivation is just the fact that I will get paid. (Sometimes a salary is even referred to as 'compensation'!)"

This is the wrong sort of motivation. A lot of people have just this attitude to work. And the general idea often seems to be that this is the only sort of motivation you should have. But that seems so wrong to me.

If you think your job is a chore and if your job involves dealing with people then your attitude towards them as people will be that they are a nuisance. And they will notice this.

A different sort of motivation would be more positive and so better. I could feel enthusiastic and excited at the prospect of doing some work. Maybe by thinking of it as a challenge or a game. This would mean I was more engaged with my work. But what is the nature of this good engagement? Certainly I think there are different kinds of it. If you could somehow switch to that engaged positive attitude at will then nothing would seem like work to you. (Then you'll be working with the flow not against it.)

What about daily tasks like washing ourselves and dressing. Are these 'work'? Our attitude to them is not as negative as it is to work in general, is it? Surely we don't desire a state where we won't need to perform these daily tasks.

What if all labour was a "labour of love"?

Money/benefits.

When you are working you are thinking about the money you will get from it. This gives you the motivation to continue doing your work. And, as a general point about motivation to some activity, it doesn't have to be money that is the outcome that makes the activity desirable. So brushing my teeth is a chore that has no intrinsic enjoyment but I know that it is a means to the end of avoiding painful teeth in the future. That avoidance of future pain is the motive to my current activity.

But I don't think the money or reward or means-ends explanation of motivation can be the whole story when it comes to work. (There must be more to people's motivation than that.) Because it suggests that while you are working you have the thought of the reward in mind quite a lot. Whereas I don't think people do. I certainly don't.

Vanity/pride.

Some activities yield the admiration of others (vanity) and yourself (pride). This could be because they are difficult (brain surgeon), glamorous (airline pilot), courageous/worthy (risking your life to save the lives of people in a war zone). So difficulty can make a job desirable. An easy job is boring. (But note that a job should not be so difficult that you are unable to do it: that would be as bad as a job that is too easy.) In this latter regard there is a source of conflict between employer and employee. You might want to do something which is difficult but your employer would prefer you to do something which doesn't challenge you so much because, on the whole, the more challenging a task the less well you will perform it. (See also The Peter Principle.)

The idea of pride in what we have achieved is important. For example what if you had a job cleaning a kitchen and you were instructed to leave a patch of a worktop permanently uncleaned. For no reason. Where the cleaning of the patch would take very little effort. You would not be happy with this. At the end of the day you would leave the kitchen clean by your efforts except the one uncleaned patch and you would feel less able to take pride in your work. Despite the fact that the unclean patch was not at all due to any failure on your part.

When people say: “I just work here” they mean that they don’t care at all about how well you do their job.

Duty.

If (for example) you are a doctor then your motivation is just the fact that you are a doctor. The satisfaction is the being useful to others in that way. This could apply to any job as long as it was useful. Your motivation is the fact that that's your job. Your "station in life".

In this sense the answer to the question of "what do you want to do when you grow up?" is: "whatever needs doing".

Abstract intrinsic pleasure.

Although work does not yield any particular intrinsic pleasure yet in some sense it is pleasurable in an abstract way. In the sense that people prefer activity to inactivity. Just walking around and exerting your physical being can be a source of pleasure.

Similarly using your mind and thinking seems to be a natural thing to do. And having it idle can be unpleasant. (Like Sherlock Holmes said he didn't like his mind being inactive because an inactive mind is like a running engine not connected to anything: consequently it just tears itself apart.)

Activity (physical and mental) is natural to humans. (People say they want to quit work and have a life of doing nothing but I don't think they would be able to do that.) But note that for an activity to be pleasurable in the abstract way as stated it needs to be difficult enough to use your abilities but not too difficult to result in failure.

Distraction.

The devil finds work for idle hands to do. If you believe this and don't want the devil to be interfering with you then you will want to be otherwise active doing some work.

Stated in a more secular way and more about mental activity. Work can distract you from unpleasant activity that your mind wanders off into when left unoccupied.

Stress and relief.

You might want a job which was intrinsically unpleasureable. Because of the satisfaction you would get once it was over.

Imagine working in a hot and smelly kitchen being shouted at all the time. When it's over the sensation of relief and relaxation will be amazing. In fact if you like relaxation you should seek out stressful situations. If you're never stressed then you will never be able to relax. Relaxation is always relaxation FROM something non-relaxed. Relaxation is a relative condition.

Demotivation.

Despite all the above motivations to work it is easy to destroy that motivation. For example I might actually enjoy something like typing for the reasons given above. But if you tell me that I have to type so many pages by 12 pm or I will be punished then this might make it less fun. Or if I had to type constantly for 16 hours a day I would soon get fed up with it. Then a fun activity is made into a chore. (The opposite of what Tom Sawyer does.)

Another demotivating factor is if your job makes no sense, if it achieves nothing. If you give somebody a job that is utterly pointless this is a quick and easy way to drive them crazy.

(See Dostoyevksy's House of the Dead Chapter 3 page 25 on the Gutenberg edition. This says: "Hard labour, as it is now carried on, presents no interest to the convict; but it has its utility. The convict makes bricks, digs the earth, builds; and all his occupations have a meaning and an end. Sometimes, even the prisoner takes an interest in what he is doing. He then wishes to work more skilfully, more advantageously. But let him be constrained to pour water from one vessel into another, or to transport a quantity of earth from one place to another, in order to perform the contrary operation immediately afterwards, then I am persuaded that at the end of a few days the prisoner would strangle himself or commit a thousand crimes, punishable with death, rather than live in such an abject condition and endure such torments. It is evident that such punishment would be rather a torture, an atrocious vengeance, than a correction. It would be absurd, for it would have no natural end.")

You also need to see what your job achieves. It is bad to give somebody a job where you just tell them to press this button or type this in that box. You need to tell them what the significance of those activities is. Why they're doing what they're doing. How they fit into the broader context of what is going on. This will make them feel better and they will do the job better too.

Hobbies.

Consider the fact that people engage in activity which they call hobbies. For no money. But which activities could fairly easily be considered work by others. For example gardening.

This shows that effort is not the same as work. You can apply much effort to your hobbies but you wouldn't call this effort "work". Even something like reading novels requires effort but that's not work.

I could have written this post with the different (but related) question: "what is the difference between effort and work?". All work is effort but not all effort is work. For example games and hobbies require effort. So the dream job would be one which required effort but was not 'work'. There's that thing people say: “Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

Hobbies also show that money can't be the sole motivation to work. But it must involve some other of the things mentioned above.

Can you make your work your hobby? (And thus make all labour a "labour of love".) By somehow consciously deciding to see it differently? Say your job was processing insurance claims. You could aim to get a pleasure from receiving a claim from a particular area of the country. Like stamp collectors get a pleasure from obtaining a rare stamp. (Even though there's nothing intrinsically enjoyable about getting a rare stamp.) You could aim to process so many claims a day and be satisfied when you achieve that. Like athletes get from beating their 'personal best'. You could be creative and see what different ways there are of processing a claim. Like artists explore ways they express themselves in their works.

Maybe you could even decide to see your job as some kind of game. Which would make it even more fun! ("In every job that must be done there is an element of fun"?)

I can imagine a government economist thinking: “the time and effort people spend on hobbies is a waste! Imagine if we could do something so that people had hobbies (things which they thought of as hobbies) but which were also productive”. For example think of all that waste of time and effort that Jack put into making scale model of Lincoln Cathedral out of matchsticks in his back yard. And the government might come up with some way to psychologically manipulate people to that end. Which sounds sinister. But the opposite is just as bad. I mean the situation where we, as a society, have such a negative attitude to work that forces people to find the satisfaction they might get from work, from hobbies instead.

Hedonism.

A hedonistic lifestyle might therefore not be one where work is absent. The satisfactions to be obtained from work are often unique to it and unobtainable elsewhere. In a life of zero exertion these would be absent. In a workless world people would start doing things which to our eyes would be work. Though they might protest that it wasn't work.

What if you were so wealthy and privileged that you never had to exert yourself at all. At mealtimes people would spoon food into your mouth. At night they would carry you to bed. Maybe tickling you with feathers all the time to keep you amused. Is that a desirable life?

If hard work and effort is virtuous then why are we keen to make machines to reduce the amount of hard work and effort we have to do? Similarly: if we make things that are fool-proof are we not just encouraging the existence of foolish people? (See also George Orwell The Road To Wigan Pier the passage in chapter 12. Search the text for phrase "the tendency of mechanical progress".)

But it's hard to accept the idea that hard work and effort are a good thing in and of themselves. What if someone worked hard but only so he could spend the money on expensive gold spoons.

Conclusion.

So I think there are more motivations to work than people admit. Sometimes I think about an example as follows. What if there was a place where there were two groups. About 60% did all the work and 40% did nothing. The 60% of workers didn't do an excessive amount of work. Let's say about 35 hours per week. And otherwise the standard of living of the two groups was about the same. If you had a choice which group would you belong to? A similar question would be: what if you had the option to be given a house to live in. Or to spend a few years building it (with some help).

Back to the question at the start. Another version of which was: “what do you want to do when you grow up?”. Once I became properly ‘grown up’ I think the most sensible answer to that question is: “whatever needs doing”.