” Sadly, most of us often prefer immediately gratifying short-term experiences over our long-term objectives.* We routinely behave as if sometime in the future, we will have more time, more money, and feel less tired or stressed.
the translation of joy into willingness to work seems to depend to a large degree on how much meaning we can attribute to our own labor.
THIS EXPERIMENT TAUGHT US that sucking the meaning out of work is surprisingly easy. If you’re a manager who really wants to demotivate your employees, destroy their work in front of their eyes. Or, if you want to be a little subtler about it, just ignore them and their efforts. On the other hand, if you want to motivate people working with you and...
when it comes to labor, human motivation is complex. It can’t be reduced to a simple “work for money” trade-off. Instead we should realize that the effect of meaning on labor, as well as the effect of eliminating meaning from labor, are more powerful than we usually expect.
In today’s economy, as we move to jobs that require imagination, creativity, thinking, and round-the-clock engagement, Marx’s emphasis on alienation adds an important ingredient to the labor mix.
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