People used to brag about their work and the quality of their work output, their list of clientele, what you had produced , the way in which you leveraged your skills in training and who you trained with.
They were fused and meshed with their professional lives, there was no distinction between professional life and leisure , it was fun.. to work. People were very proud, the porters, blacksmiths, iron mongers etc everyone was very proud. They used to have something called ''work ethic'' and immaculate pride in the quality of one's labor and produce.
But then something had happened, we are no longer proud of our work , we hate to go to work, we certainly don't feel identified with our careers, jobs and professions except rare occasions. We make clear distinctions and demarcations and boundary between personal life and work , we are very worried in maintaining life work balance as though work was some type of poison you need to detoxify yourself from
Then we started to form hobbies , if you think deeply hobbies are actually kind of occupations or vocations or professions but we distinguish them from what do we for a living , hobbies are fun , working for a living is drudgery its dreary , its a drag, its boring and dull. It's slow death. Work has become identified with repetition, with a slow decomposition of the spirit. We go to work the same way death row inmates go to the electric chair.
We are terrified of Monday mornings because they come after Sundays and Saturdays where we do as we please. Work is no longer fun, work is no longer something to look forward to , it's something to escape from.
There are several reasons for this, people being addicted to leisure time and society pushing cultural perception of work as drudgery.
A big reason is also depersonalization of manufacturing- the intermediate divorce between the artisan/worker and client, becoming an anynymous cog in the machine, impersonal mass produced indistinguishable from eachother, there is no face behind the product, there is no face behind the iphone, there is no human touch , nothing there to bind us or bond us to the product except financial investment which is actually personal investment. It's not like in the past you went to a carpenter or a technician if you wanted something fixed and that carpenter had a face , he had a family , he had a history, he had a specific type of laughter , sense of humor or not , he was a human being, so you had to develop object relations with the artisan or the manufacturer. I had to interract on an interpersonal level, but today when you buy a iphone there is nobody there, there is nobody home or face behind the product.
Another thing is the decline of professional guilds on one hand and trade unions on the other hand greatly reducing worker self-discipline, pride, and peer-regulated quality control. Quality is monitored by third parties or compromised by being subjected to Procrustean financial constraints and concerns.
There other reasons i can list to why we hate work and it's not longer fun today but it be too long. I have written too much already. I hope that answers you, the problem is not work but how it's become today.
