In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a fifteen-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen.
Joy Dividend
Joy became more productive than efficiency optimization.
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But Keynes was wrong. It turns out that when people make enough money to meet their needs, they just find new things to need and new lifestyles to aspire to; they never quite manage to keep up with the Joneses, because whenever they’re in danger of getting close, they nominate new and better Joneses with whom to try to keep up. As a result, they work harder and harder, and soon busyness becomes an emblem of prestige.
Seek knowledge for its own sake. Not all knowledge needs to be useful. Sometimes it should be pursued for pure pleasure.
After I had found the answers it was always painful to write them up or to publish them (which is how you get the acclaim).” In short, mathematics for Shannon was more like a game, something that he did for the pure intellectual joy of it. And indeed, that’s what his friends tend to remember best about him: his extraordinary playfulness.
This was what he truly loved: the work, the rolling up of the sleeves, the challenging of his intellect. ... He had even gone out on a few dates with a woman whose parents owned a Chinese restaurant he frequented, Still, he was spending the majority of his days and nights at id. Nothing pleased him quite like sharpening his chops with low-level programming work.
While it seems like discussing objectives leads to one paradox after another, this idea really should make sense. Aren’t the greatest moments and epiphanies in life so often unexpected and unplanned? Serendipity can play an outsize role in life.
Enjoyment predicts efficiency. ... Joy, humor, and playfulness are indeed assets; it was not mainly for the alliteration that I wrote of "happy hordes" above, and it is no mere joke that the Linux mascot is a cuddly, neotenous penguin. It may well turn out that one of the most important effects of open source's success will be to teach us that play is the most economically efficient mode of creative work.