This doesn't have to be either/or. Once upon a time, your "work" would've been weaving baskets or gathering berries or whatever, and you would get immediate satisfaction from seeing how you are improving your own life and the lives of those around you. Nowadays, for a lot of us, the connection between doing work and improving the world is very tenuous, maybe non-existent; but it doesn't follow that it never existed or that it's gone for good. I know a lot of people who genuinely get a sense of accomplishment from their job, including people who do stuff that seems pretty pointless (a lot of the software industry, honestly) in the grand scheme of things.

The bottom line is, you have to find a way to get satisfaction from somewhere to be mentally healthy, and if have to work anyway, getting some satisfaction out of it is preferable to not getting any.

It doesn't have to be either/or, but in practice for most people in the world, it is.

Even in tech, we don't always get to work on what we want, or what we'd find most fulfilling. Often the best we can do is put up with bullshit 75% of the time while we try to carve out some meaning in the other 25%.

Sure, "well find another job". Often easier said than done, and there are no guarantees that the new job will be more fulfilling.

I know a lot of people who get satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment from their jobs. I also know a lot of people who don't. I also know a lot of people in a weird middle state: they derive that sense of accomplishment, but they have to deal with so much bureaucracy/politics/bullshit, that it erases most or all of the good feelings they get from that accomplishment.

> The bottom line is, you have to find a way to get satisfaction from somewhere to be mentally healthy, and if have to work anyway, getting some satisfaction out of it is preferable to not getting any.

Absolutely! But I think you overestimate the number of people who are truly able to do that (HN is definitely a skewed population in that regard). And there's nothing wrong with just punching the clock, and deriving happiness outside of work.

You are describing a concept known as alienation in leftist discourse.

> Although the worker is an autonomous, self-realized human being, as an economic entity this worker is directed to goals and diverted to activities that are dictated by the bourgeoisie—who own the means of production—in order to extract from the worker the maximum amount of surplus value in the course of business competition among industrialists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

They're not mutually exclusive, as I said in my comment. They are additive, and, especially without a commute, deep involvement in one doesn't preclude the same in the other.

No, they're not mutually exclusive, but the level of control you have over your extracurriculars is orders of magnitude higher than the level of control you have over your job.

If you so choose, you can set up your life so your non-work time is damn near close to 100% happy and fulfilling (and if you find something lacking, you have the ability to change it). I doubt there is a person alive who can claim their work time is 100% happy and fulfilling and that they have control over it.

Professional athletes? Artists? Researchers?

I have a hard time imagining Steven King doesn't enjoy writing. Same for people like Ken Thompson.