You are privileged, and I definitely am too. But a simple, extreme, counterfactual works to demonstrate that many do not get this option: Picture a working mother with three children to feed and lives week-to-week with no opportunity to gain new skills. Her only option is going to be to work literally whatever appears. I suspect similar applies to most people who appear to be middle class as well.
Also, consider all those jobs you choose not to do. _Somebody_ does them, and rarely because they have differently wired brains and they actively enjoy the work you've rejected. People who clean toilets, or collect trash, or any of those other unskilled menial jobs that absolutely need doing in society aren't "enjoying this jobs every single day".
>> How did accepting that as the norm sneak into our culture?
I think you've got that totally back to front. The typical HN reader is _super privileged_ to even be able to think about choosing "a job that I love" over a less fulfilling job. 99% of the humans on the planet are doing whatever job they can just to survive. "A job that you love" has never been "the norm in our culture". Pretending most people don't just "go through life wasting away most of their prime waking hours on a job they don't love" is ignoring the lived existence of practically everybody you see each day that's not in a FAANG Michelin-starred cafeteria or double-digit equity incentivised at a swing-for-the-fences startup.
Apologies for not being more clear about this in my original comment, but I was not talking about the unfortunate people who don't have a choice. I had the HN crowd in mind when I mentioned my mates, who definitely DO have other options that would drastically improve their quality of life, but STILL choose to stick with the job that makes them miserable.
The jobs I passed on were not bad in any way, but would often require me to sell my soul in one way or another.
Besides that, if for some reason all I could do was an "unskilled menial job", I would still find the one that had at least some element which I could enjoy. I would grow into it and eventually learn to love my job or find another one.
This was all in response to the person who made the claim that "you should not love your job", which I simply don't agree with. But in his edit it appears that it's mostly an issue of semantics. "Love" has a lot of ambiguous meanings in the English language.
You are privileged, and I definitely am too. But a simple, extreme, counterfactual works to demonstrate that many do not get this option: Picture a working mother with three children to feed and lives week-to-week with no opportunity to gain new skills. Her only option is going to be to work literally whatever appears. I suspect similar applies to most people who appear to be middle class as well.