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What happens when your career becomes your whole identity

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Re: What happens when your career becomes your whole identity

#111
post #107

We have a saying back home that goes, "umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu" which literally translates to a person is a person because of other people. So in effect in Africa we care more about people than our jobs. Trouble is when your job is managing national electricity company it isn't a good approach because we tend to put our relationships above our jobs. Result is patchy electricity supply. It is one (just one not the ma…

Do you mind sharing from what country you come from and what language that is in please? I just spent three years driving around Africa, and I usually say "People treat people like people" to describe everything that is amazing about the people there. It sounds awkward, but it's the best way I have to describe what you're talking about. I'd love to quote your saying, if you don't mind!

South Africa. And I guess Xhosa/Zulu. The electricity provider mentioned is Eskom. It's complicated.

Re: What happens when your career becomes your whole identity

#112
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People born with talent have an opportunity to both themselves and the world to make use of this talent to do great things. When you replace a drive for greatness with contentment with mediocrity, you make us all worse off.

Guess what, nobody owes you, or the world at large, a thing. We only have one life and everyone's priorities are different. Want to spend your life chasing greatness? Be my guest. But if one would rather define happiness through friends and family, they have every right to do so. And plenty of people will be better off for that, themselves included.

Add to the fact, nobody chasing "greatness" (i.e. Outstanding recognition) had to be told to. They want to.

This anxiety surrounding advice advocating more self-awareness bc would-be influences might suddenly get lazy is ridiculous.

Re: What happens when your career becomes your whole identity

#113
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play devil's advocate, what is to come of deliberating on existential meaning at great length? 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 it…

Ignorance may be bliss, but only if you can remain ignorant until the absolute end. I see evidence of a paradox whereby the most powerful analytical minds are able to most effectively construct defensive counter arguments to their own inherent existential needs, allowing them to defer these needs until a criticality is reached and existential crisis manifests as a state of limbic terror which is impossible to ignore.…

After nearly 500 hours of meditating in relative isolation, i promise you, the collector collects.

Something inside us, wild and free, wants to be happy, and we stand in its way.

Re: What happens when your career becomes your whole identity

#114
post #7

In my experience extreme workaholism can often be a way to avoid or defer major life decisions that someone doesn't want to make or even consciously recognize. High status careers are often structured, full of positive feedback loops, and well compensated, all of which can strengthen the urge to defer existential questions about meaning, purpose, community, and identity until some unspecified future date, even (perha…

I just left a job I'd built an identity around. I was good at it, it was fulfilling and paid decently, but I spent all my time there and not much on anything else. Quitting was really hard. It felt a lot like breaking up with someone. It really does feel like leaving a part of myself behind.

I've been working somewhere else with less hours and far less responsibility so far. The first week or two was kind of a shock. Going back to the bottom of a place where I don't really have any kind of responsibility or even really knowledge of everything thats going on has been pretty tough. But it's refreshing in a way, i've gone back to a few hobbies and other things I haven't worked on for a while now and it's kinda nice just show up, do things I get told to do and leave without worrying about what I need to get done for tomorrow and stuff.

Re: What happens when your career becomes your whole identity

#115
post #7

In my experience extreme workaholism can often be a way to avoid or defer major life decisions that someone doesn't want to make or even consciously recognize. High status careers are often structured, full of positive feedback loops, and well compensated, all of which can strengthen the urge to defer existential questions about meaning, purpose, community, and identity until some unspecified future date, even (perha…

I'm 35, I have been trying to turn the boat around on this for 2 years now. You're exactly right.

Re: What happens when your career becomes your whole identity

#116
Bad article, in part because of the incomplete title. It should be called "What happens when your career becomes your whole identity, when you don't like your job and think it's a waste of time". If this latter part is not true, there is much less of a problem, but for some reason current mainstream American culture wants to extrapolate all the way to "work should be compartmentalized and minimized".

The problem is, work is where a lot of people find meaning in life. For those people, more work means more meaning, and you're hurting them by telling them otherwise, especially if they are too young to know better than what you are telling them. And you're also preventing young people from becoming outliers ... what would be the cost to our society, and to the individuals personally, if Einstein, Dirac, Pauli, or whoever had been told to cut down on the amount of time they spend thinking about physics stuff, they need to achieve good work/life balance.

A lot of people in China are working pretty hard. If you want your country to get whomped by China economically and geopolitically, spread the idea that it's bad to work hard.

Americans in the past, back when America was able to coordinate to do ambitious things, worked pretty hard. So if you want to have a country that is unable to recreate glories of the past, spread the idea that it's bad to work hard.

All this only happens if you have an idea of work as a draining thing, a net negative on the individual doing the work. But I am happier because of the work that I have done. I am a better person than I was before.

Nobody goes to the kung fu school and says "hey it's bad to exercise this much, you shouldn't kick so high or punch so fast, just make sure not to train that much, okay?" But for some reason we have decided it's okay to give people this advice in other realms. You know what, I never felt as good physically as I did when I was in serious kung fu training. (Never looked as good either).

If you are in a job that actually is damaging if you do it too much for too long, then by all means, minimize that -- but you know what, in today's world, there are always proximal things you can do that are not damaging that will improve your job or your ability to do your job over time.

But advice like this does not make the distinction between jobs that are damaging and jobs that aren't. We're losing the idea that the latter thing exists, and I think that is very bad for the overall development of our society.

Re: What happens when your career becomes your whole identity

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love your job and you'll never work a day in your life. Live your job and you won't have any love left to give.

The problem I have with this is that love is a complicated thing. I love playing soccer, but without the social validation of my friends who also play it I would absolutely never practice. Similarly for most careers, even highly lovable ones.

same for jamming blues/jazz.

social communication without using words. amazing social cohesion.

Re: What happens when your career becomes your whole identity

#118
post #105
post #7

In my experience extreme workaholism can often be a way to avoid or defer major life decisions that someone doesn't want to make or even consciously recognize. High status careers are often structured, full of positive feedback loops, and well compensated, all of which can strengthen the urge to defer existential questions about meaning, purpose, community, and identity until some unspecified future date, even (perha…

> all of which can strengthen the urge to defer existential questions about meaning, purpose, community, and identity until some unspecified future date I've quit my Software Engineering job twice now to spend years of my life doing whatever I want. First time I spent two years driving from Alaska to Argentina [1] and second time I just spent three years driving right around Africa [2]. Both times I had no job, no bo…

You are sure are doing a whole lot of book promotion on here and on reddit!

This may come across as harsh, but driving on highways, pan-american or not, doesn't strike me as much of an adventure in the current era.

Re: What happens when your career becomes your whole identity

#119
post #7

In my experience extreme workaholism can often be a way to avoid or defer major life decisions that someone doesn't want to make or even consciously recognize. High status careers are often structured, full of positive feedback loops, and well compensated, all of which can strengthen the urge to defer existential questions about meaning, purpose, community, and identity until some unspecified future date, even (perha…

For me work is what I enjoy the most about life. I would do it for free - In fact I worked on open source projects for free for almost a decade. Including some successful/popular ones. That said I still feel burned out. I've come to realize that not only did the work I do for free not give me any financial advantage (which I expected), but the people who've hired me over the past few years don't seem to recognize tha…

what I've found over and over again is that managers will give promotions to 35 year olds who spent most of their lives playing video games

They must be special be special because they place such a high value on their time, whereas you give yours away for free desire to hire them by being a Shiny Object. Appearances matter, not because they are such a good guide to substance but because of the social fact that so many people respond to them. It's also possible/probable that these managers were 35 year olds who spent most of their lives playing video games (or sports, or cards, or whatever) and consciously or unconsciously hire people with similar personality types.

Not only are life and business not a meritocracy, there is not a singular ordering of competence. Social rewards most often flow not to someone who knows how to do something but the one who knows how to get others to do that for them. So, you have good technical skills at whatever it is you do, you're good at working on your own, and you are also a Nice Person who likes to share. This pretty much guarantees you will be treated like a worker bee.

Now, consider a large project that is beyond your individual capabilities and would require 10 people with your skills and diligence to realize in a year. Can you work 10 times as hard? No. Can you do it over 10 years? Maybe, but you'll be short of money the whole time and someone else would probably pass you by or make your project obsolete. You could find 9 other people with similar skill sets to yours and then cooperate, but that seems a bit unlikely.

Or you could find 12-13 people who you think are 80% as good as you and then tell them what you want - in other words, give them your high-level understanding of how the project should be built and then making sure they have the resources to do it. So instead of thinking of development as a problem of memory, storage, CPU time, and bug hunting, it becomes a problem of resources, budgets, reliability, and HR issues. Managers are in the business of instructing developers while relinquishing control of (and eventually competence in) the lower-level stuff of actually programming the machines. Another way to think of it is that while you are programming the electronic machine to make current flow to do blinkenlights, managers are people who have learned to program/hack the corporate machine to make money flow to make people do things.

To sum up, you will never get promoted/resourced for your technical expertise. The better you are at solving technical problems, the more you will be taken for granted as an extension of the machine you program. The best route out of this is to come up with a small project that you could do yourself, but instead parcel the sub-tasks out between 5-7 different people, and then lavish praise upon them when it's completed.

You can do this by stealth or with the agreement of your own manager, but focus on the objective and be vague on the details of implementation; this is what gives you the room to solicit help from others. You're not stealing their effort, you're providing the structure and taking responsibility by giving them a clearly defined task that they can easily perform without having to think too much. Your bosses want a result and don't want to be bogged down in understanding the details. Your peers want clearly defined tasks and enjoyable rewards and don't want to think too much. You become a manager by taking responsibility; you worry about stuff for other people (the details for your superiors, the big picture for your team members) by sitting on the border between their comfort zones without asking anyone to actually leave theirs.

Re: What happens when your career becomes your whole identity

#120
post #7

In my experience extreme workaholism can often be a way to avoid or defer major life decisions that someone doesn't want to make or even consciously recognize. High status careers are often structured, full of positive feedback loops, and well compensated, all of which can strengthen the urge to defer existential questions about meaning, purpose, community, and identity until some unspecified future date, even (perha…

I agree with much of this, both out of personal experience and that of my friend.

Work is a distraction from what is really gnawing at your ankles. Even if you start to burn out it still feels preferable to the alternative, if you're even aware of that in the first place.

And to be honest, it's valid even though it's massively unhealthy. Facing your underlying issues, whatever they are, is hard work but also, it's ultimately the most rewarding work.

I've a lot to share about the matter, but it's a bit much and a little too personal for a public response here.

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