How to Love Your Work

This video explores the complexities of choosing a career, highlighting the emotional and societal pressures that often lead individuals away from jobs they truly enjoy. It emphasizes the importance of love and emotional balance in making fulfilling career choices, free from the need to impress others or seek validation through work.

In a perfect world, when it comes to choosing an occupation, we would have only two priorities in mind. Firstly, to find a job that we enjoy. And secondly, to find a job that pays us enough to cover reasonable material needs. But to think so freely, we would have to be emotionally balanced in a way that few of us actually are. In reality, when it comes to choosing an occupation, we tend to be haunted by three additional priorities. We need to find a job that will pay not just enough to cover reasonable material expenses, but a lot more besides—enough to impress other people, even those we don't like very much. We also crave a job that will allow us not to be at the mercy of other people whom we may, deep down, fear and distrust. And we hope for a job that will make us known, esteemed, honored, and perhaps famous, so that we will never again have to feel small or neglected. Needless to say, these three additional requirements make working life hugely more complicated and unhappy than it would otherwise need to be. No wonder we may get stuck choosing what to do. Rather than being able to focus on the jobs that we are passionate about and that we would intrinsically enjoy, we have to twist our natures to appease extrinsic imperatives. There is no way that we could, for example, work as a kindergarten teacher, a psychotherapist, a carpenter, or a cook. Our psychological drive to impress, to have power over others, and to be known to strangers precludes such relatively modest choices from the outset. The state of our psyches means that we have to aim for far more stellar careers, even in fields we don't really like much, and we may have to work much harder than is good for our health or our families. We are prone to be constantly panicked because the bar for failing is so much higher. A slight wind of disapproval from the public might be experienced as appalling. A bit less money than the astronomical sum we made last year will register as fateful. Under pressure, we may make unwise and hasty moves, cut corners, involve ourselves in risky schemes, and not give our work the time and calm it needs. What would enable us to make the right career choices is something that seems, on the face of it, to have nothing to do with work at all: love. A profound experience of love, in both childhood and adulthood. A child who is properly loved is a creature who doesn't need to prove itself in any significant way. It doesn't have to excel at school, dazzle acquaintances, or shore up a parent's fragile sense of esteem.