Alienated Labour and Meaningful Work

I've been thinking a lot lately about what it is that causes boredom and frustration at work.

I think there is a lot to be said for Marx's theory of alienation. My own brief description - and interpretation of it for the purposes of this post - is this: "It sucks to work for someone else on something you don't really truly care about, for some external reward which has nothing directly to do with the work (such as money)."

In a twisted way though, I think it's actually quite possible to shoot yourself in the foot by trying to find "meaningful work". My burnout in software development was a classic illustration of this: I loved programming as a hobby and a pure craft, but working for other people on random boring business systems for money slowly ground me down until I simply couldn't take it any more. Essentially, the work was still "alienated labour", despite in theory doing something that I might otherwise enjoy, in a more personally-inspired or hobby context.

Artists report this feeling when doing commissioned works where they are told in detail what to do, as opposed to doing their own thing, or generally being allowed near-complete creative freedom in commissioned work. Obviously, in business this is almost impossible to escape, because the chances of your personal creative passion aligning with business objectives 100% at all times is extremely low in most types of work.

So how to fix this?

I think there is a lot to be said for the idea of treating a job as just a job. This basically acknowledges that it's just some alienated labour that you're doing for money, and you don't get too caught up with any deeper meaning behind it. Boredom, frustration, and eventual burnout are still possible of course - but they can be mitigated by the act of simply finding a comfortable flow without expecting any kind of existential fulfilment from the whole thing.

After a decade in a "meaningful career", versus years of odd casual jobs (including my current gig as a KP), what I've found is that 1) It's actually much easier for me to treat menial work as "just a job" and tolerate it on that level, and 2) Everybody has strengths and weaknesses which make certain "menial jobs" vastly more tolerable than others, even if they're not very "meaningful" to us.

For me, the key to occupational sanity seems to be almost the exact opposite of "finding meaningful work". That is: finding work which is so meaningless that I can tolerate it simply by not expecting anything at all from it other than going in, grinding out the time, and being paid for it. The less "engagement", the better. Well, that's the theory anyway!

In practice, it's more of a balance of course. Focusing on the "positives" of jobs can sometimes lead us astray. Often it's just as important to ask - "Which types of 'negatives' would I be good at tolerating?", which, granted, is really just another "strength" and a positive - but many people don't like to talk like that. And every job interview advice source tells you to speak in positives and avoid drawing attention to negatives, which I think in this case tends to feed back into people's evaluation of occupation choice and glosses over something that's actually quite important.

I'll write a follow-up to this soon, but for now, this describes the general abstract idea of how I'm looking to tackle this issue.