"when does a job feel meaningful? whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce sufferings in others. though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status or money."
"to see ourseles as the centre of the universe and the present time as the summit of history, to view our upcoming meetings as being of overwhelming significance, to neglect the lessons of cemeteries, to read only sparingly, to feel the pressure of deadlines, to snap at colleagues, to make our way through conference agendas marked '11:00 a.m. to 11:15 a.m.: coffee break', to behave heedlessly and greedily and then to combust in battle - maybe all of this, in the end, is working wisdom. it is paying death too much respect to prepare for it with sage presciptions. ... let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves."
"our work will at least have distracted us, it will have provided a perfect bubble in which to invest our hopes for perfection, it will have focused our immeasurable anxieties on a few relatively small-scale and achievable goals, it will have given us a sense of mastery, it will have made us respectably tired, it will have put food on the table. it will have kept us out of greater trouble."
--- The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton
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