Why I love my work - and why I hate it

Some people even experience an entire career to put off building meaningful relationships

- zeFrank (on procrastination)

I love my job. The fact that there are so many so varied things that I can do, the fact that I get to learn all the time and the fact that I get to work with people individually and the fact that I occasionally get to speak in front of a hundred people (yes, I am a bit vain, but as Andi Hektor said today in a lecture - If a person has no vanity, there is just no motivation for him to get in front of people and speak). The fact that I sometimes manage to inspire people or at least make their lives better also helps - considering that even now, I sometimes think myself useless to the society, I really could not imagine my life if that really was the case - I need meaning in my work and giving back to the world is an integral part of it.

At a dinner discussion with Peeter Marvet (Tehnokratt, although he put that job down two years ago because it didn't pay enough) and Andi Hektor, the latter made a crucial observation that in IT, you see a lot of fanaticisim - people willingly putting 48 straight hours of work into something, just because it is fun (a la Garage48). This is seen in other fields too, but it seems much more common in IT - the reason, they conjectured, is that it is hard to disengage from something (inter)active, while most other fields are markedly passive (mostly consisting of routine chores, which often give no immediate feedback). Even in other sciences, the prevalent mode of work is passive - reading or observing, as opposed to doing yourself. The only other field of human endeavor where the same problem applies seems to be art - and indeed, I recently met an artist who seems to be having the same problem...

I do have to admit that programming has that entangling quality. I have been putting 30+ hrs into the division protocol for Sharemind the past two weeks - not because I had time for it, but because I just could not get it out of my head. Same tends to happen with mathematical problems (even simple ones), which also require such an active approach (and indeed, most famous mathematicians are also known for periods during which they did barely nothing else but think on a problem). Both math and computer science require intensive thought to solve a problem, while in most other sciences, at least part of the solution is usually fairly routine (finding subjects for the experiment) or at least requires a markedly lower amount of conscious effort (i.e. putting up lab equipment).

However, this same aspect of the job is also the one aspect which I really hate - it being so engaging makes it very difficult to disengage from it at times. It is very easy to overwork oneself and, more importantly, to use work as an excuse for not dealing with other important things. Relationships, for instance.

It is so easy to fool yourself into thinking that what you are doing in terms of work is more important and that it helps you to become "better" - smarter, more famous, richer - and, while this may well be true, it is also completely irrelevant. It does not matter, how "good" you are (whatever your criterion for goodness is), if you just do not have time for anything else. That goodness becomes self-reproducing - it becomes a thing in itself, disconnected from what is really important in life. Which is dangerous - especially because the person himself usually does not notice this is going on since his own priorities are the things that change. In short, he will start to think that the thing in itself is important as a thing in itself and that it is the most important thing in the world and that everything else is irrelevant.

Which will leave the person completely broken once that illusion is shattered for one reason or another...

If relationships are important to you MAKE TIME FOR THEM, if you can at all afford doing so (i.e. if doing so means you will lose your sustenance and die of famine, that constitutes a valid reason for not stopping. The facts that you will have less opportunities or be exposed to fewer things, do not)