I spent my whole day yesterday working on a song. I'm really good at getting sucked into non-moneymaking projects that I enjoy to the point of not even realizing how much time I've just spent doing it.
I wish I could put as much energy and time and creativity into something that was going to make me money... but everything that I would do for money/with money in mind is aggressively impossible to enjoy. If I were making these songs for money, I would probably hate doing it.
When I was teaching there was a concept of two kinds of motivation-- intrinsic, and extrinsic.
Extrinsic means you're doing something because you want a reward-- candy, stickers, money, fame etc., and intrinsic means you're doing something because doing it is a reward unto itself.
I also remember reading a study where they found that using extrinsic motivation actually demotivated students and caused them to view the tasks as a meaningless nuisance that they had to endure in order to get the reward, which is exactly how I feel about work. I think that's exactly how a lot of people feel about work, and I think it's why people end up in soul-crushing jobs where the point is to screw others and cause havoc... because there is no emphasis on the value of the work itself-- its value is determined by its reward, and the social effect of wealth. But I really don't think that that is fooling hedge fund managers into thinking they're doing something wonderful... unless they're really, really good at self-deception. They probably know they're *******s, and the way they deal with it is by seeing other people as suckers/lesser beings. Which in turn leads to them creating the tea party/protesting the taxation that they just evade through loopholes anyways... because they don't feel any responsibility towards people who are 'less' than they are. That's capitalism in a nutshell-- classism, segregation, dehumanization, exploitation and entitlement.
One thing about teaching in Korea is that it's a rare example of an employee's market... and while some public schools are slavedrivers anyways, at my last job I really lucked out and got a position where they mostly just ignored me and I was completely free to do anything I wanted to do. I had literally no guidance, no demands... I was just placed in an office and told to 'do what you do'. Nobody really cared about me because it didn't effect them if I was good or bad... I could just keep my head down and as long as I didn't completely **** things up, they would pay me.
In the beginning I thought 'wow, great... I can be super lazy and get paid!'... but then I realized that that was making me extremely depressed. I would come in and face a meaningless job and do meaningless, half-assed work in order to get my reward. And I tried really hard to just grit my teeth and bear it, but it just kept on making me miserable.
So at some point, I realized that you can be a lot happier in your job if you actually put effort into doing it right. So I started to learn more about how to be a teacher, and started making powerpoint games for the kids to play in class, and put more effort into my appearance, my mannerisms, and defined a code of behavior and applied it universally. I was always polite, but never tolerant of bad behavior. The rules became the thing... and they didn't just revolve around me, they were good rules and I tried to lead by example.
My salary didn't go up, but I felt so much better about going into work (living in Korea was a completely different story, of course). I came to enjoy putting effort into thinking up projects and even though I could have coasted through the same material year after year (some teachers use the same things for weeks and weeks on end), I actually pushed myself to keep coming up with new things all the time.
I didn't even think about my salary... most of it just sat in my bank account until I finally started investing it. I always had enough, so it stopped being an issue. I was still driven to achieve things in my profession, and I started to realize that once money is completely irrelevant, you get to a point where you're driven by other things-- better things. My co-workers had more respect for me, my students had more respect for me, and I had more respect for myself. It was a triple win. I was still painfully isolated, at odds with a conservative, conformist culture and lonely as hell, but I had some degree of self-respect and faith in my ability to turn things around. I felt like I was living in some sort of quasi-so******t utopia in microcosm. Interestingly enough, teachers are a rare example of workers who always seem to live within their means... they say it's because there's less hierarchy and the salaries aren't too radically different from person to person. They're competing with people within the same wage bracket as opposed to people way outside of their wage bracket. And everyone is relatively happy.
On the other hand, now that I'm unemployed, I'm really unmotivated and constantly worrying about money... which in turn just seems to demotivate me even more. If I didn't have to worry about housing, health care, food, etc... and if there was no stigma against the unemployed, and I didn't feel like a worthless piece of shit for living with my parents and not having a job... I would probably go from store to store and house to house, asking people if they needed my help with anything. I mean, what else would there be to do? But instead, I'm ashamed to show my face because I'm that unemployed guy who lives with his parents. I now have low self-efficacy, which is probably the biggest problem for other unemployed/poor people... and probably the biggest killer of productivity.
I think that's why I've come to think of myself as a social democrat... give the people what they need, remove all of the stigmas, and they'll eventually make a better world for everyone... where everyone feels good about themselves and we don't stand in each other's way.
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