This is a subject I have been thinking about for a while, and today is as good a day as any to try to bring my thoughts about it into focus.

From the time we first enter the school system, we are unintentionally taught a particular point of view : school is bad, play is good.

This has a lot to do with the limits of how our education works. Children are born curious and wanting to learn. It’s a miracle diablu how efficiently we kill that in our kids.

And this is how we teach them to hate work as well. At a too-early age, we force them to sit down and shut up while a teacher talks to them. They come to associate school with being boring and stifling, and this teaches them to resent having to do it and to treasure every moment away from it.

Thus a sharp and unnecessary wall is erected separating the two worlds of work and play. You endure work because you have to, and then the moment you are allowed to go, you revert to being just a kid and try to get out of having to do anything else that you don’t want to do.

That’s why kids resist their chores so much. It’s not the task itself, it’s that it takes them away from our rich tapestry of entertainment options and languid self-indulgence, and they have absorbed the idea that they need all of that undemanding leisure time they can get just to cope with the other part of life where their personhood and will are suppressed in the name of education.

This was an inevitable result of the rise of individualism. The more we strengthen the individual, the more outrageous it seems to be forced to do things against out will. It goes against the grain of a highly individualist society which reinforces individuality, will, and autonomy at every corner for any individual’s personal freedom to do as they please at any time.

Eventually, you leave school and join the work force. But the exact same attitude prevails there, too. There is the massive unspoken assumption that work is bad and everyone hates it and everyone would rather be doing something else.

It is school all over again. Nothing has changed. You do the work that your job requires and take what little pleasures you can while doing so, and every waking moment when you are free from your responsibilities is spent indulging in all the manifold avenues of entertainment and leisure activities you can.

And the one thing we do not do, under any circumstances, is anything that seems like work. We treat work as a necessary evil at best and a crime against our personhood at worst, and the idea of working when you don’t have to is absurd.

And woe betide anyone who confesses to liking their job, because unless you have the sort of job others wish they could have, saying that you enjoy your work will be interpreted as meaning that you are either a brown-nosing apple polisher looking for a pat on the head for having an extra correct attitude, or a person so appallingly boring that for them, boring things are the only things boring enough for said boring person to enjoy.

So unless you are a race car driver or a rock star, you cannot claim to enjoy the thing you are paid to do for a living without social penalty. (And if you DO have that kind of job, you will also be socially penalized via jealously. Oh, you love your job, must be NICE.)

This creates the rather perverse situation in which essentially nobody is allowed to admit they like their work. To do so is a subversive act because it contradicts the dominant narrative that work is bad and not-work is good.

But what is the real difference? It’s certainly not effort. People expend enormous effort on things nobody is forcing them to do all the time. Hiking, writing articles for Wikipedia, devoting hours of sweat and toil to a video game… practically everything we do for fun and enjoy requires an investment of effort. We are clearly not merely lazy creatures who prefer to do as little as possible.

We want to expend effort. So the difference between work and play cannot be merely a matter of energy expended. Nor can it be the nature of the work, because one person’s mind numbing tedium is another person’s bread and butter.

It has to be a matter of choice. What we choose to do is fun and play, and what we do without wanting to do it is work.

Then what is wrong with choosing to work? And enjoy it? Are we not better off learning to enjoy the thing we have already chosen to do (our jobs) instead of wasting time and energy resenting our chosen jobs?

Sure, most of us are not doing our dream jobs, that is to say, we are not doing that magical job that so suits our talents that it defeats the entire concept of work by being exactly the sort of thing that we would choose to do and hence is like being paid to play all day.

But those jobs, by and large, do not exist. All jobs inevitably demand that we do something we do not feel like doing at the time and would not choose to do, and hence all jobs are work.

All life is work. No one leads an effortless life, except perhaps for the people who have learned not to resist their own choices and adapt to their circumstances.

The ultimate example of this schoolyard mentality is the concept of retirement. We absorb this “work bad leisure good” mentality so deeply that we imagine that the best thing in the world must be unlimited leisure time.

But people are not built to do nothing. Sooner or later, you will want to fulfill your human need for meaningful effort. A mountain of candy might seem like the ultimate goodness to a child, but sooner or later they are going to eat themselves sick and want some real food.

Would it really be so bad if we learned to love our work? If we made a space for people to admit that sometimes their jobs are not entirely awful? Would it really be such a threat to our sense of autonomy and individuality to just give in, adapt to our circumstances, and be a happier and healthier organism?

I think that if we just admitted that work is something we all need in order to lend purpose to our lives and satisfy our feeling of having contributed to the collective, then we would all be a lot better off, and we could go forward into our lives rid of a corrosive delusion that only interferes with true happiness.

That’s all from me for today folks! Talk to you again tomorrow.