What happens when your career becomes your whole identity

>> “Find something you love to do and you’ll never have to work a day in your life” is another college-counseling standby of unknown provenance.

> That is probably the biggest load of crap foisted on pop culture in a while. I love what I do, and I work every day. This morning's task is reviewing a help file for accuracy. Hol-ee shite, that's not why I got into programming computers when I was 12. But it needs to be done, and I'm one of the ones that can knowledgeably review it. I really should write that test plan, but I keep putting it off for obvious reasons. Oh, sure, I get to play Puzzle Solver by shuffling some bits around, and it's what I spend most of my days doing, but it ain't all fun and games.

> And that's just Working for The Man(tm). Gonna start a brewpub? Maybe an online SaaS business? Oh, my friend, your crap work has just begun; so much so, you might have to leave the fun stuff to your employees. You will work every day, and hard.

> Don't get the wrong idea, I look forward to going to work most days, and I've been doing this for a long while. But there's a reason they call it "work", and there's a reason they pay you. Enjoy the hell out of the enjoyable parts, and when the less enjoyable work comes, remember that you are (if of the average HN demographic) paid handsomely for it.

Do you think you'll find an answer, rationally speaking (that is, using the tools of reason and logic)? Notably, Godel's incompleteness theorems suggest these tools may be insufficient. More specifically, if you try to rationally "justify" what you ought to be doing, you will always be able to - legitimately! - impugn its logical foundation.

This suggests that consciously reasoning about what someone's fundamental purpose is may not be the best way to go about things. Rather, just as how we make most decisions, an intuitive and heuristical approach may be better. In other words, "do what feels right."

What feels right may materialize as a family, as charity, as building a business, or even building a career. My point is that all of these can be challenged as "deferring existential questions" - again legitimately - because they cannot be justified rationally. (All of these, equally, can be criticized in hindsight as being "wrong": wrong marriage decision, wrong way to raise children, wrong work-life balance, wrong charitable/activist cause.)

As a result, I don't think the criticism that a career - even an all-consuming one (as a family may be) - is somehow less justified. This is not to invite pure relativism: some things do seem to be more meaningful than others.

But! It is precisely that this "seems to be" is intuitive, and not rational, which constitutes the foundation of our belief. And so if a career-focus seems "intuitive", then I think it's meaningful enough.

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EDIT: One other thing to note is that people who are fairly content with their lives don't often ponder _why_ their life is meaningful. They've specified a priori assumptions for what makes it meaningful (e.g. charitable giving, helping others), or intuitively feel what is meaningful (e.g. family, friends, happiness), and that is that. It's precisely the people who end up endlessly questioning these assumptions - facing the meaning of their life head on - that seem to be most depressed. This is because it's an intellectual deadend - it cannot be deduced rationally. One way, then, to answer this existential question is to simply defer: don't question, do what feels right, and avoid what doesn't.

Working hard is probably step 1 on the road to enmeshment. Just wanted to put forward the opinion that most things worth doing require insane levels of hard work to succeed at. They will become part of your identity. That's not a bad thing.

This is the important bit:

> One of our time's great sociological questions is why we filled downtime back up with work, and the reason is it's better than alcoholism. At some point during the Truman Administration home life became more stressful than work life, where stressful is defined either as hysterical drama or rheumatismy boredom, and by Reagan II the home was no longer a respite from modern society's incessant demands to produce or at the very least a place to get a nap. ...

> Part of the reason work and home keep mixing despite our professed desires is that that's how Americans were taught to see an aspirational adult life. In every TV show and movie after Leave It To Beaver the gimmick has always been that the protagonist's job and personal life overlap-- doctors in love, CIA agents defending their family, late nights at the office trading zingers or abuse stories. While we no longer think we want the overlap, the shows reinforced the false psychology that a person is something, all the time and everywhere, and the backdrop world "sees" it, accepts it. This applies just as much to negative depictions of work/life overlap, e.g. the obsessed cop whose wife is now divorcing him because of the job: the point isn't that the overlap is "good", that's not the aspiration; the point is that the structure of these depictions represents the fundamental narcissistic fantasy: a fixed and clear identity-- a character-- seen by a potential audience. This is why home is not relaxing: we are working to not let it be all that we are. [emphasis mine]