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kleinbl00  ·  988 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Building a vision of life without work.

I don't know why people overthink this. Actually, that's not true. I do, it's just that the answer is uncharitable.

We've been through a dozen or so employees by now. I'm not really a "there's two kinds of people" person but for purposes of this discussion, there's two kinds of employees: those who are employees and those who are not.

The overwhelming majority of people who have worked for us are going to be working for someone their entire lives. They are externally motivated, are disinterested in autonomy, wish to minimize their exposure to change and innovation and derive their pleasure entirely from the hours they are not earning a living. There is nothing wrong with that. But they're deliberately giving control of their waking life over to me and my wife. We give them something fulfilling to do, we give them parameters within which to do it, we give them the means to provide food shelter and self-actualization and they look at the self-actualization and say NO THANKS.

A few of the people who work for us are transitory. They're working for us because they can't afford to work for themselves. They have not amassed the credibility and resources to seek their own self-actualization but they are striving, successfully or unsuccessfully, to eliminate all bosses from their future. And we hang onto them as long as we can and wish them well when we can't and keep in touch with them when they're gone and watch their trajectories with interest.

Neither position is morally superior. Neither attitude is somehow better than the other. But lemme tell ya - if you spend your life enjoying other people telling you what to do, DON'T RETIRE. Find a job that you enjoy and do it until you can't. It pays better.

And if you don't? This article is meaningless for you anyway.

    People need people, and people need things to do. Much like Neo populated his Matrix, so must you populate your own domain with new stuff.

Holy shit this article boils down to "how to get a life" and if your job is your life fucking keep it.