Notes on “Face it: you're a crazy person - by Adam Mastroianni”

When you fully unpack any job, you’ll discover something astounding: only a crazy person should do it.

This is the obvious-but-overlooked insight that you find when you unpack: people spend so much time doing their jobs. Hours! Every day! It’s 2pm on a Tuesday and you’re doing your job, and now it’s 3:47pm and you’re still doing it. There’s no amount of willpower that can carry you through a lifetime of Tuesday afternoons. Whatever you’re supposed to be doing in those hours, you’d better want to do it.

In my experience, whenever you unpack somebody, you inevitably discover something extremely weird about them

apparently you can, through sheer force of will, lack of self-knowledge, and refusal to unpack the details, earn the right to do a job you hate for the rest of your life.

We didn’t exactly evolve in an ancestral environment with a lot of career opportunities. And then, once we invented agriculture, almost everyone was a farmer the next 10,000 years. “What should I do with my life?” is really a post-1850 problem, which means, in the big scheme of things, we haven’t had any time to work on it.