Google and tech’s elite are living in a parallel universe – John Naughton

The problem with what you're saying is that the people who "do not draw a clear line between work and play" are not nearly as romantically satisfied with their work as you claim.

Do you not see how this "passion for work" argument is often employed to make employees work the maximum they can? If you apply to work at Goldman Sachs, or McKinsey, or Google, the message is clear: it is not enough that you sell your time to us, you must sell your soul as well! You have to be "passionate" about investment banking, consulting, or software engineering to get a job at these places. Consequently, young grads who are looking for jobs now have to make a genuine effort to work ungodly hours in an effort to demonstrate their "passion" to these firms. Now maybe that is because some of them are genuinely interested in their work (although how you get a "passion" for excel modelling I do not know), but it is more likely that it is something these new workers feel they must do in order to be successful. What is the outcome? Elite companies can make talented young people work insane hours without compensating them for the extra profit that they create. The notion that Eric Schmidt is saying his workers should work round the clock out of sheer concern for their fulfilment is absolutely laughable.

Btw, this form of thinking is quite uniquely American. Perhaps it springs from the puritan ideal of deriving meaning in your life from work. For the rest of the developed world (Western Europe, for example) the notion of working harder and harder because you have to be as "passionate" as everyone else sounds ridiculous. There is more to life than work. Truly. You are on earth. You can read fiction in your spare time, also hike, and perhaps volunteer to socialize feral cats for adoption.

TL;DR: Please stop with your propaganda that it is a noble thing to find this mythical level of enjoyment with working to increase shareholder value. Leisure time is cool.

> hodgepodge of gripes in search of a premise

Welcome to The Guardian's opinion pages, where everything is a source of outrage and the shadowy "1%" are always out to get you.

Good luck finding enough people who will be passionate about cleaning your office, or collecting your trash, or driving your Uber, or processing your DMV application, or building your new house, or stripping your old laptop for recycling, or making your Starbucks, or exterminating your pests, or cleaning your blocked sewer, or picking your fruit, etc etc.

It sounds lovely to say we can all be passion workers, and of course there will be people who are passionate about the above jobs, but not all of them, not by a long shot.

Of course automation will help here, to some degree, but its potential is overstated in the absence of general purpose AI.

We're a very very long way from technology solving the need of many to perform any available job to support their existence, and even if we could get there, there are many people for whom their passion is not something that can generate economic returns.

Tl:dr, I believe your comment is fanciful :)

> [...] A tiny slice of us are now able to work with passion, on what we want to do. Like artists working on a song or a painting or a book, they do not draw a clear line between work and play. They're always working and always playing. [...]

Yes and this lifestyle is simply unhealthy. Life should be your top priority, not work. Even artists sometimes need a break and care about different things then art itself.

Yes

It also seems like a text that is missing an ending. Very shallow text