Listen, your argument follows from your premises, but your premises are flawed. Your argument is reductive because it requires the assumption that people only want one thing (specifically in this case: to do a thing other than their job).
Of course it follows that they're doing something they don't want to be doing when you only allow them to want one thing.
It's not reasonable to take someone saying, "I'd rather be parasailing..." to mean, "I don't want to do this work." Those are not equivalent statements. For starters, one is relative and the other is absolute. Even if that weren't the case, people can want more than one thing and even conflicting things.
If I say, "I want to fly like Superman" you can't then conclude that everything in my life that I'm doing is something I don't want to be doing since I'm not flying like Superman at any moment.
It's reductive and the only thing it fully explains is the highly reductive space it constructs.
> If we're going do discuss justifying original points, perhaps you should address yours: "I wouldn’t accept an employee or a boss who thought this [the exchanged of labour for money] was a reasonable definition of a job."
I've already justified it. In my experience, which I understand is not your experience, an employee with this attitude is more likely to not have a good work ethic. You then made up a bunch of stuff about what I mean by that, but I just mean they're less likely to do a good job. A boss with this attitude is more likely to feel entitled to my labor and make unreasonable demands, including but not limited to trying to require me to do things I don't want to do (i.e., that I haven't agreed to do as part of accepting a job).
> Can you at least see my objection? Someone who thinks a job aught to be pleasurable is breaking down the boundary between work and pleasure. This can very easily lead to abuse, where someone believes they are entitled to their employees' work and the employees should be thankful for being exploited.
There was never a moment when I couldn't see your objection. I just think the opposite is more likely, but this view is really just your opinion and not actually related to your original statement, except in terms of its explanatory power for why you want to believe the world works a certain way.
It's wholly unclear to me why a boss acting badly means all employees everywhere should have a wall between work and pleasure. That seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Should we all just do jobs we hate so this doesn't happen?
A boss can certainly try to exploit his employees by using their non-monetary interests against them. But the boss that thinks transactionally is more likely to do it!
On the flip side, any employee can have a good work ethic, but...
Suppose you have a transactional employee and an employee who wants to be there. Suppose also you have a machine that requires maintenance and it is such that it is difficult to see whether that maintenance has been done. If the maintenance isn't done, you won't know until (say) two years later when the machine breaks down and requires relatively expensive repairs.
Are you going to assign the employee that has said to you this is just transactional? What is his incentive to even do the maintenance? Yes, either employee can get away without doing the maintenance. But which one do you think is more likely to shirk the responsibility? Which one is more likely to not be around to face consequences if they don't do the work?
So, yes, I see what you are saying. But I'm not even a little bit convinced. I don't want to deal with people as employees, bosses, partners, contractors, clients, etc who view work this way, because 'the real world' just doesn't work that way and people who think it does, again in my experience are generally more likely to be a problem than others.