What is a WorkHate?
Coming up with the name of the site, I certainly didn’t intend on making it a philosophy, but I am currently predicting it looking bad in the eyes of potential employees. What it implies is obvious. I hate work. That’s probably going to stop me from getting work in the future unless I try and nip it in the bud quickly. It shouldn’t do, but I’m paranoid and kind of bored at the moment, so writing up an article that starts the site up is probably a good and productive thing to do to waste the time.
And who knows, maybe potential employers might look beyond all my other obvious flaws and find this site and want not to hire me because of it. Maybe this article will prevent that. Maybe it’ll look like I’m sucking up in advance. Maybe I’ll get pizza after this. It’s late but who cares.
Let’s face it; everybody hates work. Work is dull and boring and tedious and long winded and redundant and goes on and on feeling like you accomplished the point a while ago but were still forced to keep going on because the tediousness requires you to do so and by the time you realized you’ve gone too far you’ve gone too far and you’ve turned parts of your brain off so that they go numb and thinking is no longer a luxury to be enjoyed all the time and by god this sentence is unnecessarily long!
Work is that long sentence.
A definition may be in order here. Let’s go with what’s on the front page of the website.
Work: The excess effort which occurs during a project when one is no longer experiencing a necessary level of entertainment to consider the situation one of a joyous nature.
The Compact Oxford Dictionary does a much better competent job of it:
Noun 1 activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a result. 2 such activity as a means of earning income. 3 a task or tasks to be undertaken. 4 a thing or things done or made; the result of an action. 5 (works) treated as sing. Chiefly Brit. a place where industrial or manublah blah blah, you get the point.
So what you see here is a personal definition, right? Not that whole obsessive, must be right stuff but a feeling which has come about as the result of three years working jobs that produced long frustrated sighs which demanded more entertainment. More challenge.
I am not someone who dislikes the Compact Oxford Dictionary version of work. I like to be productive, to work on projects, to see an achievement of results and stuff that show my work wasn’t in vain. If work is entertaining then it’s a bonus. Nay, a result that the work is being productive and challenging.
When these criteria have not been met, it becomes a WorkHate.
A WorkHate is unnecessary effort. It’s when you’ve been filing a thousand reports by hand when a database should be made for them to prevent tedious refilling. It’s performing an exercise that brings about 50% of a single muscle’s power when you could be doing an exercise that brings about 50% of each muscle’s power at no extra cost. It’s someone helping you do a twelve rep set of bench presses the whole way without letting you do it for yourself.
It’s an act that’s so pointless that doing it can bring nothing but a long frustrating sigh some point down the line, whether from you or from those around you that know better.
It can be a job that could be done much more effectively if only you had a suggestion box that your boss actually read. A method of working things out if only you bothered to research it properly. Something you hate but do because you’re too lazy to think of anything new to do, or too stupid to admit that it’s getting you nowhere.
The closest thing a WorkHate can bring you is the realization that the WorkHate is wrong, the incorrect method to be improved upon or removed entirely.
Let’s quote someone to look smart. ‘Hack away at the inessentials!” It comes from Bruce Lee. He says it to remove bad habits, to have daily decrease on stuff you don’t need. In the art of hitting people in the face, it’s removing those moves that don’t hit people in the face, or do so in a way much too slow to provide any real assistance.
So I’m a minimalist at heart. I could have probably just said that. I could have also written a lot less. But one of the key points of the WorkHate is that the WorkHate must prevent things from being entertaining to be considered a WorkHate. I like writing endlessly to the point of incoherence, so it’s entertaining. There are probably a lot of potential contradictions here. Personal opinion does effect a WorkHate. One man’s boredom will be another’s life dream to perform. A job that is long and tedious but is required in order to achieve something personally is not potentially a WorkHate, but could slowly descend into one if left to stagnate in its current state or if the job does not benefit one in particular. If you do actively hate it, but know it’s for your own too, then it’s not a WorkHate.
It is a WorkHate when it’s a job that earns you a lot of money, but takes away all your free time and you openly loath it, your boss and everything it stands for and getting a job that’s more fun is a lot more effective. It is a WorkHate if you have deluded yourself into thinking it’s for your own good, but what you are doing is meaningless in every way (again potential contradiction. Have fun arguing about it in the forum!)
It is a WorkHate if it involves needless worry about something beyond your control that doesn’t affect you or is severely unlikely too. It s a WorkHate when you whine and complain and have nothing positive to say or add to the situation.
WorkHate is not the same as Epic fail. Failure is important and should be achieved regularly. It means at least you’re doing something.
I could make a list of rules, but I’d rather leave it open to potential argument with the random mish mash of crap you see above this line. If I were to have some rules I would probably make it one long one to remain minimalist but somehow fall into a bureaucratic trap of over redundancy.
Like this.
Do something you like and have fun while doing it, making sure you take the best route to doing that something whilst still keeping it fun for you. If you don’t, then you are in a workHate situation.
That’s it. Now go away.
Or Subscribe.
Or talk about it on the forum.
OR even go back to the archives!
