Does anyone else find things like this from sites like 80000 hours really alienating? Do people really think like this? I don't know anyone who takes their career so seriously.
I think this article just reflects the worldview of a 40something career DC bureaucrat, I'm sure much or all of this advice is relevant to someone living that life. I personally just have little in common with the author, other than living in a major city. I'm guessing much of HN doesn't have much in common with him either.
With that being said, some of the advice (like about not trading time for money) is pretty relevant for upper middle-class tech professionals too
Some people don't have a choice. It sounds lovely to have anything else in your life worth taking seriously, but that's not an opportunity that is available to everybody.
What if you have no community, no chosen family, no friendly acquaintances, and you know that will never change? If your choices are essentially between dedication to work and dying of despair in an empty room, what's wrong with choosing the path that tries to help those who will follow?
Is this a thought experiment? How can you know you will never have a community, chosen family, nor friendly acquaintances? You can work on gaining those just like you can work on a career.
I would assume that for most people, "spending time on your mental health" is not something you do in solitary as a 9-to-5 job. It is more likely to mean building friendships at work or elsewhere, working towards meaningful goals, and leaving time to rest your mind and body. If this precludes a 100% dedication to some startup idea, then that's just something to accept about onself. Everything else will just lead to nothing but burnout, which kills all capacity to contribute anyway. Stuff like having a positive influence on the people you meet can also be a contribution, and there can be personal value and gratification even outside of "contributions", such as simply learning something new (maybe even something without economic value). Personally, I feel like it's highly arguable whether yet another SV-style startup is likely to result in a net positive contribution to the world anyway. Often, the drive to optimize everything for productivity seems to stem more from a need to prove ones worth to oneself and a lottery player's fantasy of riches. I commend everyone that takes their inspiration from more than those things, in business or outside.
As someone who agrees with your point about not taking your career so seriously I agree with point 1 on the post.
> Don’t focus too much on long-term plans.
As someone who has just worked hard on the thing in front of me without long term planning it has paid off pretty well. That along with being pleasant seems to go a long way. I didn't need a list or a philosophy to figure that out I just happened.
12 was where I felt alienated.
> Avoid spending time to earn or save money.
When the author starts talking about their time being so valuable that they throw money at things and don't cook etc. to me they sound like a rich out of touch robot and not a normal relatable person.
I guess I'm off-put by something more specific in the article than "taking your career seriously." I know lots of people who take their career seriously in a certain sense. They devote a lot of hours to their career and see it as a source of meaning. However, the center of their focus tends to be "internal" in the sense that, at the end of the day, they are most concerned with the value that their career adds to their own lives.
This article seems to have a very different focal point. It's not about making your career more fulfilling for you. It's not about how to have a career that fulfills your own desires of pursuing your curiosity or doing the sort of good that you enjoy doing (like being a doctor or teacher). Rather, the article is written as if from the perspective of an outside person viewing this person's career. It's about having a career that will please other people. Crowdsourcing your decisions will make you choose the things that other people find worthwhile. Taking on many projects will help you build a diverse resume to impress other people. The last point even specifically says not to spend too much time looking for a job that you find pleasant because there might be jobs that can "do more good" in the world that aren't pleasant.
The whole emphasis on taking a job that benefits the world without necessarily being pleasant for yourself just seems so robotic to me. At the end of the day, why do you care about being altruistic? Presumably because it's a path towards creating a world where people can enjoy life more. If you accomplish this by living a life that you yourself don't enjoy, it just seems antithetical any motivation for improving the world that I can imagine.
I know people who are spending the better part of their youth working hard to become doctors or something similar. They are working very hard and (like the author) thinking about ways of impressing others in pursuit of getting into med school and getting into competitive specialties or whatever. But there are two differences. (1) They know that this sort of impressing others is something they only need to do at the beginning of their career, and (2) they actually like helping others so they will eventually reach a point where their own pleasure and their altruism is aligned. This article seems to be suggesting that we live a life where these things are not aligned, and make no attempt to align them. I understand that there are jobs that aren't fun, and someone has to do them, but I don't expect ambitious people to work hard to find these jobs.
The point of a job should be to improve the world. The point of a career is to be able to do more impactful jobs by increasing skill and understanding.
Personality and job fit are only important as far as they allow you to do the job better.
Do you understand why I would call this perspective robotic though? I could never live like that. The reason I take a job is because I think it will improve my life. A paycheck is obviously part of that, but so is doing a job I enjoy. I would prefer a job that does 10 units of good and gives me 10 units of pleasure to a job that does 20 units of good and gives me 2 units of pleasure.
That makes sense. But do you see why it might be conflicting to some people if they have the chance to do, say, 40 units of good for 8 pleasure instead of 10 for 10? Where do you draw the line?
At a the UK university I attend I know a sizeable group of people who think exactly like this and have probably already read this exact article. Diligent people dead set on making the most change they can with their skills.
One the one hand I agree with you, sometimes a career is just a thing one does to live comfortably. On the other hand, it's 80,000 hours of one's life, and it can be squandered if one does not at least occasionally think about what they're doing with that chunk of time and whether they can improve how they spend it.
