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How unreasonable is it to prioritize work over interpersonal connections? I truly enjoy my work and find it so much more gratifying than anything else I have ever done in my life, but there seems to be some sort of prevailing consensus that you are only human if you relate to others? Has anyone else led a somewhat more solitary existence and prioritized only themselves over connections with others (outside of the connections you make at work anyway in a team, although those connections are more transactional in nature)?
I'd strongly advice against any kind of one-track lifestyle. No matter what you do, things can always go bad in a way that is not really your fault. It's good to have fallbacks, ideally uncorrelated ones, that you can be happy about. If you have a reasonably fun job that pays reasonably well (but is not amazing by either measure), have a partner, have friends, have family you're on good terms with, have kids, own a house that you deliberately made your own, and maybe some other things like hobbies or volunteer work or local community stuff, then it's pretty hard for your life to get completely ruined in a modern western society.
Work in particular is imo one of the easiest and most tempting one-tracks to get into, and thus the one you should be most careful about. This has a bunch of reasons, in no particular order:
-I'm hardly a communist, but they are correct that bosses are very eager to get you into this. It's just not about capitalism, it's simply very beneficial for anyone in a hierarchy above you if you have nothing else on your plate. It's extremely easy to talk a young unattached girl into unpaid overwork for a job she loves.
-Because of the way aging works, a lot of the other things will only get harder as you get older: Well-adjusted people will already be paired of and have kids, and they will already have enough friends so that even if they like you, they'll probably put no work in to turn this into a friendship, for example.
-This only applies to you if you have a "fun" career: Work is fundamentally the stuff that needs to be done, but which is not fun enough for people to do for free. It's also normal to get paid badly at the start of your career. And there is this pervasive idea that you need to "find the right work" that "fulfills" you. This leads to an interesting dysfunction in modern times: Extreme competition around fun jobs that people are actually willing to do for free. I've seen more than one person get completely burned out on something where they think they just need to "focus more on their career", except everyone is doing this so you can't get ahead; The fundamental problem is that supply outstrips demand so much that only a tiny sliver of ultra-competent can earn anything at all.
-Work has a tendency to become drudgery over time, moreso if you have nothing else. There are unfortunately large differences between "sounds good", "is fun (at first)" and "stays tolerable over long time spans". Worse, most people only find out once it happens to them.
-Contrariwise, especially on a partner & kids I've seen a noticeable tendency where people think that they don't need or even want it when they are young, but they nevertheless become unhappy and regretful once they're too old and it's too late.
-The great majority of work is ephemeral, even the work you think isn't. At some point you'll realize that you left almost nothing behind for the future. Are you ready for this?
-Finally, to hark back to the general criticism of one-track lifestyles, work is especially susceptible to outside influence. You boss leaves and the new boss sucks. Or the entire field isn't doing so well so you're getting chopped. Or politics does something stupid that impacts your company negative. Or some of your favorite coworkers leave and the atmosphere turns bad. Or the world changes in an unpredictable way that makes your job far less fun (to understand what I mean, see the complaints from programmers who like programming itself but hate supervising and double-checking AIs who do the actual coding).
Really great points, thank you for providing forward looking insights into this.
Maybe because I’ve spent 20+ years trying to make friends (ever since I was a conscious child, for example), but they haven’t lasted (no fault of theirs, maybe some of mine), and of course relationships are almost a joke in how little they mean since one day someone can wake up and just decide they don’t find you worth their time anymore, I feel like I have some experience with being alone.
The intellectual stimulation at work is so intense that it leaves almost no space for worrying about anything interpersonal. So was graduate school, but you’re right that the landscape of work is ever changing and it’s quite likely that in 5 years I might get replaced by some AI.
You’ve given me a lot to think about, I appreciate that.
What does it mean when somebody claims to be female, but describes an archetypal, rite-of-passage experience of men?
Any unattractive or ordinary-looking person could have such a realization after being dumped by an attractive person, regardless of gender.
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