mattnewport comments on Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction: Why Less Wrong is anti-Instrumental Rationality - Less Wrong

105 Post author: patrissimo 14 September 2010 04:17PM

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Comment author: mattnewport 14 September 2010 10:23:37PM *  3 points [-]

But that's true of anything! I love eating, but there are subsets of this task I don't enjoy, and that's even more true of baking or cooking. It's true when I play a game, or write an article, or watch a television show (gotta skip those ads!), or anything else I can think of. There's nothing special about work.

Ok, this makes more sense to me. There are certainly things which I would say I 'love' doing which I do not enjoy every aspect of. In that sense I have never loved work but I can imagine that some people are fortunate enough to do so. I still don't really understand pjeby's comment in this context though. I love snowboarding in this sense for example but I still have to make a conscious effort to motivate myself with the sub-tasks required to get to the enjoyable parts.

Working is merely a particularly large and complex sub-task I perform in order to obtain the financial resources to do the things I actually 'love' and many (work and non-work) sub-tasks are boring and unpleasant and require motivational hacks to get done, which seems to be the whole point of the kind of self-improvement being discussed.