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Just came from work, so please excuse the language and the shifting focus. It has been a long (but rewarding) day! I suppose I should preface this by saying that I live in a Scandinavian country. On top of the huge vacations (relative to the US) that are the norm there, I am in a career (in)famous for having long vacations (teaching). That's not even counting all the perks of living in a welfare state. Safe to say, I am in a very cushy, privileged position compared to perhaps the majority of people. I am very happy at work. I have some bad days where I would rather have just stayed in bed, but those are handily outweighed by the days where I feel that I am getting something worthwhile out of what I do. I am still quite new at the job, but I enjoy it very much so far. This "something worthwhile", I suppose, is a sense of pleasure derived from doing my work and succeeding at it, helping people learn, and seeing some of them even enjoy it. I get good feedback, and am happy to take on extra duties and do favors for co-workers (within reason), who I like. I am compensated very well, which I suspect is a big reason why I enjoy doing the work, but is not the sole reason why I feel my work has value. However, I was quite miserable in my apprenticeship a couple years ago. The conditions (commute, student population, workload) were quite similar to what I am working with now, but the difference in how I experienced it is huge to how it is for me now. I have narrowed why I think that is to following factors:
I still got the fuzzies from having done a good job occasionally, but those positive feelings were mostly drowned out by the stress. The occasional fuckup turned into crushing defeats, which I agonized over well into the night, keeping me from getting sleep, leading to more fuckups. Already hectic days were made heavier by busywork and bureaucracy. Heavy drinking in the weekends didn't help any of it at all. You could argue that I was/am a whiny bitch idiot about most of these things, and I wouldn't disagree with you too much, but that doesn't lessen the fact that if I wasn't there already, it brought me very close to a depression. All these things combined made the work feel thankless and gruelling, and crucially, without value. What was supposed to be free/rest time was dominated by being stressed about work-related poo poo. I suppose you could argue that it wasn't a job in the sense that there was no wage, but it certainly was work, and rarely felt anything like fulfilling. In hindsight I am glad I had the experience, but would pretty much rather eat dogshit than do it again. But with those bad factors removed from the situation, work sometimes feels like free time even though I'm working harder than I have in years, and while I go home tired, I feel happy and refreshed. I grin at my paycheck, and thinking about it makes me happy on rough days. I'm unsure if I'd continue for very long if there was something like universal/guaranteed minimum income, because I'd like to maybe get another degree. But that's so I can teach in some specialized topics, so I would definitely return to teaching in a year or two. *** I'm the kind of guy who likes to sit on my rear end and play games for weeks if I have nothing else going on. But I will always eventually get a bad conscience about it, because I'm not engaged in any kind of productive work, either related to self-improvement or otherwise. Being unemployed after writing my thesis this summer lead me to, amongst other things, try to (re-)learn arithmetic, algebra, economics, (sadly abandoned after a few weeks, but hey I learned a few things, followed by:) exercise and weight loss, working with music, helping edit  my girlfriend's novel, reading quite a few books on various topics, and (eventually successful) job hunting. That took place in about two and a half months, which I think is a modest achievement!*** This is really rambling on and I apologize, but I want to weigh in on what I suppose you could call the coercive moral compulsion to do certain kinds of work in modern society. It is somewhat similar to the US over here (puritan work ethic cultures unite!) so people who are seen as not participating in what is viewed as acceptably intensive, prestigious, and culturally privileged labor are certainly looked down upon. People on disability are increasingly viewed as shiftless parasites in political discourse. For instance, the unemployed who are supported by welfare, like jobseekers, are similarly disparaged. The fact that the activity of applying for jobs (which for many takes enough time and effort to reasonably be regarded as a part time job on its own) entitles you to some welfare payments drives quite a few people into a rage these days, because being out of work is a moral failing that must be punished. Not, as it often is, a consequence of factors outside of the unemployed's control, or at least not indicative of their moral fortitude (or lack thereof). The lack of a wage is not enough punishment; these people, in addition, must be spat on. I think it is partly the need to feel elevated above another person, often mentioned here, that drives this kind of attitude. The recent, rightwards drift in politics might be another factor. It is unfortunate, but I don't think it is a sustainable attitude. As some people here have pointed out, I believe that automation will replace more jobs than will be created by new industries. If we do not change our attitude and thinking to accomodate for the changes that will be required to make sure that the people pushed out of the workforce can survive (either by some kind of free, comprehensive educational programme to teach them how to build the robots that build the robots, or more likely, some kind of GMI), I fear there will be more suffering and unrest than society can tolerate without using excessive coercive violence to control itself. So the attitude and thinking will either self-correct out of existence, or we will learn to love Big Brother. Haha wow, this took a sudden turn into speculative bullshit. Pretty much the universal sign that I should stop now. *** TL;DR: 1. I believe work definitely has value outside of meeting financial needs, but this nebulous value is dependent on factors (often external to the work activity itself) that in my experience can make the difference between lovely miserable drudgery and rewarding labor, without the work itself being much different. 2. I think humans are innately driven to undertake some kind of rewarding activity/work if left idle long enough. Remaining idle indefinitely is probably a sign of depression or some other dysfunction, but is not a moral failing. 3. Pious, protestant work ethic in modern society will either become passé or will usher us into a dystopian hell-future when the robots take over. murphyslaw fucked around with this message at 19:50 on Oct 28, 2014 |
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Oct 28, 2014 19:36
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If it's any consolation, I don't the relative utopia I live in by accident of birth and luck will last very long. Or it might spread, who knows!
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Oct 28, 2014 19:59
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This probably belongs in the game dev chat, but to offer a few points to wateroverfire: From what I understand of the games industry, without an advertising and publishing budget or significant free time to do these things on your own, it's quite unlikely for games to turn a good profit regardless of their quality, at least until enough people think it's worth their money. Advertising can be superseded by word-of-mouth, but the indie/early access market seems pretty flooded, so barriers for entry are high. Also the amount of money required to support a family is almost exponentially higher than the amount of money it takes to keep a bachelor programmer from starving to death and being kicked out by the landlord. Bachelor programmers living on ramen seems to be the standard for most one-person game development teams, unless their game is so genius that it starts a new genre (see: minecraft), which is unlikely to happen for most developers, regardless of skill. So there's that too.
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Oct 28, 2014 20:32
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Vermain posted:The very idea of what is "good" is a shifty subject to pin down if we're solely using profit as a measure. A game like FarmVille is, gameplay-wise, dull and monotonous, but the fact that it is specifically designed to prey upon basic human compulsions has made Zynga a frankly incredible amount of money. Is FarmVille "good"? E: zeitgueist answers with under 10 words what i answer in 200. i should go to bed You might have answered your own question. Farmville (and its clones) is extremely effective in enabling compulsive playing because of its use of skinnerbox/operant conditioning methods to incentivize game play (small rewards/positive feedback for every action, like a rat getting a small pellet of food every time it operates a lever in a correct fashion). People are better at recognizing and rejecting that sort of gameplay these days, but it's still quite a successful model in social network games and MMOs, from what I can see. It is certainly "good" from a market perspective the same way that heroin is "good", in that once people become hooked, they tend to keep playing (and paying for) it, so the commodity is successful and thus "good" in that sense. But from the perspective of the player, as you say, the gameplay is about as fun as watching paint dry. Many players probably recognize this on an intellectual level, but their lizard brains tell them it's "fun" because of the marginal rewards they get for each action they make, so they keep playing. But you can't pay your bills with the happy fun feelings of a gamer, so innovation comes slowly. Not that skinnerbox games are inherently bad, or that the presence of skinnerbox mechanics makes a game bad.
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Oct 28, 2014 22:24
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Cicero posted:I'm pretty sure some people legitimately enjoy games like FarmVille, though, it's just that few people do in SA's primary demographic of technologically-adept young males. For sure; like I said, they're not bad. It's just that people who have played them (to excess?) get burned out on them pretty hard. As a genre it's pretty good for stress relief or just giving yourself something to fiddle with for 3 minutes, leave, and come back to in a few hours. See: incremental clicker games like cookie clicker.
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Oct 28, 2014 22:44
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