What does it mean to love our work? Hint: It’s not about success (Part I)

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This post is part of a series exploring what it really means to love our work. Make sure to check out the table of contents for other posts in the series.

More often than not, we fool ourselves into thinking that we love our work because we are successful at it.

A basic problem with this is that we usually think of success as equivalent to a set of socially-conditioned values that aren’t conducive to happiness.

The conventional concept of success is equivalent to one, or a combination of the following ideas:

Success as high income. If common sense and introspection were not enough, we count with an overwhelming amount of evidence from economics and psychology confirming that beyond levels of abject poverty, higher levels of income don’t translate into higher levels of happiness.

This is why work that generates high income isn’t the same thing as work we love, and therefore not a necessary ingredient for happiness.

Success as prestige. We tend to identify success with prestige — our capacity to impress others and the feeling of recognition that comes with it.

Part of the frustration people feel with trying to impress others, is that it’s so difficult to accomplish it by, well, trying. Emotionally intelligent people are very good at spotting deliberate attempts to impress them, and are easily put off by people who do that.

That’s why prestige usually comes as a by-product of a high income, an impressive job title or other things that we pursue more directly.

But invariably, prestige doesn’t bring real happiness. All it can provide us with is a temporary endocrine rush that far from satisfying us in any sense, triggers an addictive craving for more.

In his book The Happiness Hypothesis, psychologist Jonathan Haidt points out that unfortunately, we’re biologically wired by natural selection to seek prestige as it does indeed help us to amass resources at the expense of others — and during prehistorical times, this usually meant higher probabilities of survival.

Part of the art of happiness is, therefore, learning to control our natural impulse for seeking prestige, and not letting ourselves be fooled into work that doesn’t contribute to happiness because of it.

Success as “security.” Another idea closely associated with being successful at work is the sense of “security” that we obtain from a predictable source of income. This is more a case of employees who earn salaries and work for large corporations that supposedly can assure long term survival of their jobs.

Beyond the point of whether there can truly be much predictability of income for employees in modern economies characterized by enormous amounts of change, “security” is at least a problematic indicator of how work contributes to happiness.

There is no doubt that some degree of continuity in our work is necessary for satisfactorily seeing our efforts come to fruition, but beyond that, “security” mostly becomes an excuse for being stuck in work that we don’t love — or that we hate.

When people claim they love the “security” their jobs or businesses give them, what they usually really mean is that they don’t believe themselves to be able to both generate a “sufficiently large” income, and love their work.

This “sufficiently large” income is most of times determined by a set of false, socially-imposed beliefs about how buying things contributes to our happiness (see “Success as high income” above).

Also, when people conform to work they don’t love for a long enough period of time they become disconnected from their genuine convictions and interests to a point where they feel clueless about which line of work they would love.

And while the most important step towards breaking this state of cluelessness would be to quit their current jobs or leave the businesses they’re involved with, a false sense of “security” makes the decision to quit less attractive.

Working for “security” is very different to loving our work.

In my next post, I’ll explore the misconceptions around the idea of working for achieving success in the form of excellence, and the problem with the general idea of focusing on success altogether as a motivation for work.

Tagged as: Happiness, Human condition, Jonathan Haidt, Love, Non-conformism, Work