My anthropological take on it is that most people are so framed within a very clearly (and often narrowly) defined Judeo-Xian world view that doing work that one actually loves is an alien thought. Life (and work), according to Genesis, is meant to be drudgery and misery, because we have fallen, are sinful, and deserve our misery.

Fuck that! Life’s awesome. Work is awesome. And miserable work is for people who just don’t get it-

Thanks Julie-
D

Sometime in the mid-90s my parents visited me in Austin. I was still running Go Media at the time. My mother, in particular, was always somewhat baffled as to what I did for a living. So they spent a morning sitting on the couch in my office, observing. I had a design meeting, answered lots of email, brainstormed with a coworker, and installed some software. On the way to lunch, I asked my folks if they found that interesting. “Well,” said my mom, “I wanted to see you *work*…”

Now almost everything I do I can do from anywhere at any time. And even though I may do some of that work at home alone, more people than ever know what I’m up to because of Twitter and FriendFeed. I have the continuous partial attention of hundreds of coworkers.

We’re at the very beginning of the work redesign process - basically we’re creating use case scenarios now - experimenting with online and offline ways of getting our needs as knowledge workers met.

Cool stuff :)