Day 247: Work as Means

Talked with a friend today about doing meaningful work and a question came up: If you see your work as a means to an end rather than an end in itself, should you even do it?

There’s an argument to be made for both sides. Some people think that they’ll finally be happy once they reach some goal they have in mind, whether that’s a financial outcome or some other measure of success. In reality, this typically doesn’t happen because their goals change as they get closer to what they had imagined (we’re adaptive creatures after all), or they realize that the goal doesn’t provide lasting satisfaction in the way that they’d imagined. Happiness based off of external circumstances is way more brittle and unreliable compared to happiness based off of your perspective no matter what the circumstances. This seems to point towards prioritizing meaning and satisfaction in your work over some outcome that it’d bring about.

At the same time, even if you enjoy your work overall, there are often parts of it that aren’t so fun. This is reflected in my work on Browserflow and building tools like Intention — I love the work and enjoy what I’m creating, but there are parts like marketing and sales that I don’t enjoy as much. I see them as a necessary components of making my work financially sustainable though, so I accept them as “things I just need to do”. Obviously, this can change though, and I’m sure that if I spent more time learning about those topics and getting better at them, I’d likely enjoy them more.

Perhaps the answer to the question depends on the level at which you’re considering it. For your work overall, hopefully it’ll be something that you are proud of and find great meaning in. But for your day-to-day work, it seems inevitable that you’ll have days where you’re spending time in ways that you wouldn’t be stoked about.

In general, it’s useful to ask myself the question: “Why am I working on this?” And if the answer isn’t “because I want to”, that should be cause to examine whether I really need to do it.