alt Hacker News> This, to paraphrase Portlandia, is one of the dreams of the ’90s — that our work selves and our true natures could be one and the same.
I have always wanted to achieve this (to no avail so far). To live for something bigger. To be pushed to use my talents in full. To evolve without stop and throw away the old self without hesitance. These three to me are arguably the important characteristics of a true human-being. They (and some other characteristics) tell humans from animals.
It may sound like, but is not, workaholism. Workaholism is escapism. Workaholism, like alcoholism, roots from a certain sad history one wants to avoid. This is not workaholism, but a conscious pursuit of perfection, of "Godhood", as one may say as an atheist.
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You will be a functioning part of an egregore whether you like it or not!
Unfortunately, wage labor as our primary labor structure has a tendency to produce Severance far more frequently than it does a meaningful marriage between work and personal purpose.
There are a lot of people that argue that if you were to eliminate wage labor, and distribute goods as equally as possible or at least take care of basic needs for free through universal income or some other means that people would get lazy and stop working...but it's not true. As your post illustrates, working and producing is just as essential of an aspect of human life as consuming is—people want to produce, they just want it to be meaningful! They want to work on stuff that aligns with their own interests and beliefs. Ironically the people that claim that this isn't the case are probably the few that actually would prefer to never work (they want to keep wage labor in place so that they can extract capital from laborers while they relax and "lead" instead of produce themselves).
You might find "Laborem Exercens"[0] a good read.
[0] https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...
>To be pushed to use my talents in full. To evolve without stop and throw away the old self without hesitance. These three to me are arguably the important characteristics of a true human-being. They (and some other characteristics) tell humans from animals.
A wolf walking half the Europe or an Arctic fox crossing the Arctic, and you think you have the drive to push, to evolve and to throw away the old self.
Even Epsilons can be useful in this brave new world of finding purpose through your job.