One of the weirdest psychological insights, which many people including myself have discovered recently, is that a fake job that doesn't actually require any work can be more stressful and unpleasant than a real job.
This reduces to a belief, which I also hold, that you have inherent worth.
It's like Bret Victor's story of Puddles. Imagine you adopt a puppy. You name him Puddles. You take puddles home and you give them a little snack and you stick puddles in the cage and you lock the door forever and never open it again. Most, although not all, would agree this is cruel.
We have a notion of what it means to live a full doggy life. Dogs have to run around. They sniff other dogs and they pee on things. That's kind of what it means to be a dog. Dogs have a set of capabilities and we recognize that a dog has to be allowed the full free expression of its entire range of capabilities in order to be a dog.
The same is true for people. Like a dog needs to hunt, people seek meaning. They wither away without it.
A consulting firm I worked with had great sales people.
They could get software consultants anywhere, especially where they were not needed.
A former colleague of mine got assigned along another to assist an Italian bank with their software projects.
He told me that in his office there were 6/8 people, barely doing any work. Two of them were leads in that office and did their best to never ever be seen or meet anyone. They would just close themselves in the office the whole day doing god knows what. If you knocked they would pretend to not be there.
My colleagues tried to get some work to do desperately for months, but consultancy said to shut up because the contract was huge.
He says it was one of the most miserable periods of his life because "there's enough Youtube a person can watch for 18 months" and there were more than 2 hours per day of commuting on top of that.
