Easy Hard Work

Some types of work are easier than others. Building websites is much easier than writing fiction. It's not that it's less work, insofar as it's quite time-consuming, but it's easier to do the work.

I don't have to force myself to build websites, at least when I'm doing it for myself. By contrast, I always had to force myself to write. Building websites is engaging in a way that writing fiction just isn't. They're both work, but doing the work in one case is easy, and in the other the bulk of effort goes to just trying to keep myself at the desk.

But what if some work is just that much harder than other work? I've noted before that building websites almost feels like a video game at times, I think because it has a innate feedback loop that writing lacks. You write some code, and the result pops up in the browser. You instantly know if it's working, and there's great satisfaction to be taken when it is. Not so with writing. You can only really tell if it's working once you've had some time away from it, and even then it's not a sure thing.

But am I taking this feeling for granted? Maybe it's not the case for everyone. And if it's not, then shouldn't be take our kicks where we get them? If someone else described cooking the same way, I wouldn't be able to agree. Cooking is fun and satisfying, but not nearly as engaging as coding. But if someone found cooking as engaging as I find coding, I'd say that person is cut out to be a chef.

But still, it's not that simple. Because I only find coding that engaging when I care about the project. I had fun building my personal site. Likewise with my mom's website. But my freelance gigs aren't nearly as fun, and I think this is because I just don't care as much. The emotional investment isn't there. Which tells that the emotional investment is necessary to doing good work. That might seem obvious, but I've also spent a lot of time trying to detach myself emotionally from a given project because I was convinced that too much investment was a bad thing, because it tied too much of your self worth to the project and so engendered self-consciousness. If I could just become a stoic craftsman, then maybe I could do something interesting, free from fear and doubt.

There might be something to that, and I doubt there's one way to go about it. Probably you just have to find the thing that works for you. If you can't get there without the emotional volatility, embrace it. If you can only get there by quashing the feelings, crush them mercilessly. Usually you can do this with another feeling. Quash doubt with anger, for instance. That takes an immense amount of effort, which is probably why writing is so exhausting. You're trying to keep a lid on the self-doubt while perfecting a craft at the same time.

This is why people like Ray Bradbury tell you not to think. Stephen King says to write fast enough to outrun the self doubt. Another way to think about it is to do your best to try to get absorbed in the work to such a degree that you and your feelings disappear, and all that's left is the work.

Which comes back to engagement. The more engaging work is, the easier it is to fall into it, so to speak. But choosing activities solely based on how engaging they are seems like a bad idea. If you did that, you'd just play video games all day. That said, I don't find video games nearly as engaging as I used to. So this, like all things, seems subject to change.

The broader question though is is it wrong to choose work based on how engaging it is? Am I wrong to choose websites over writing because I find building websites so much more engaging than writing? I don't see why that should be a problem. If you can find something useful to do that you don't have to force yourself to do, that seems like as close a recipe to career happiness as you can get.

But it's multivariate. The work either has to be engaging enough or important enough to make up for it. Writing simply isn't important enough to me to make up how not engaging it is. Coding is engaging, but when I do for anyone other than myself or someone I care about, suddenly it's not important enough to be worth the effort.

That's why I want to work for myself. Maybe I'm selfish, but I find it very difficult to summon the will to work for other people. I can do it. I have done it. And I've worked hard. But it's no way to spend a life. The solution is to work for myself, or possibly with a friend. I'm pretty sure that's as close to a satisfying career as I'm ever going to get.