Projects vs jobs

Which do you pursue?

Ooph. This is bleak:

“I will never own a home. My purpose is to provide value to my employer. I will move thousands of miles away from my family because there are no jobs left. I will become a meaningless cog in an uncaring machine. My income will be eaten up by taxes, rent, and car expenses. One-third of my life will be spent sleeping, the other third will be spent working. The last third will be mostly taken up by chores and errands. I will be too exhausted to do anything meaningful with what little precious free time I have left. I will visit my family once or twice a year, watching them slowly fade away from my life until they perish. I am living in the most prosperous time in human history.”

That’s a meme that a friend posted in a Telegram group. The sad thing is that it’s true for many people whether they know it or not. Many people live this way, in a kind of hell, only living to work for The Man, to have a “job.”

But there's a little trick which helps you create more agency in your life and boosts creativity which is to think of your life as a series of projects, not jobs.

Instead of having a “job” with everything in your life revolving around it, pursue “projects” that allow you to be creative, and make pivots if needed. It’s just a reframing. A shift in mindset.

Cooking. Learning a language. Studying an ancient civilization. Inspecting the mind. Formulating a new mathematical proof. Starting a nonprofit. Wiring a home. Writing software. Visiting a new country. Surfing. Gardening.

Think of these as projects. Think of yourself as a project.

Job-based thinking tends to rely on narrow, repetitive skills and encourages strictly vertical moves up a career ladder. This locks us into a rigid path, often stifling creativity.

Project-based thinking gives us control, some agency. Projects foster self-expression. Not all projects generate money, but they are more fulfilling. Some projects generate unthinkable amounts of money, like selling a business, while nearly all “jobs” make it impossible to attain that level of wealth.

Remember when you were a kid? You didn't have a job. You just got into trouble and explored and went outside and played video games and built forts and painted and sang and made things and read books and made mistakes and did projects.

So why have so many of us stopped being kids? It’s because we’ve been told the lie that we need to “get a job” and to get serious.

Some people will go decades in a job, which ends up aimlessly defining their lives, without any genuine projects on the horizon. A job comes with strings attached, with a kind of implicit obedience that squashes your ability to pursue the kinds of projects that makes you human.

I like this quote from Peter in the film Office Space:

“Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements!”

What projects are you working on?