Humor-Less: How Taking Our Work Too Seriously Costs Us Money And Sanity
We don’t even take Work as Seriously as We Think
If someone handed you ten billion dollars right now, tax-free, no strings attached—would you still be at your next meeting?
Good. You’re probably one of what I would consider, “most people”.
The truth is, most of us don’t take work as seriously as we pretend to. We just don’t know what else to do.
So we dress it up with urgency. We perform stress like it’s virtue. We fake it to pretend we care.
Others, actually do take their work too seriously. It causes serious problems as a result. Companies lose money, people quit, and sometimes people even get hurt.
If aliens landed tomorrow and vaporized every sales dashboard, email thread, and client pitch, the universe would still go on.
We act like our jobs are sacred. If they truly were, we’d be doing them without the money, right?
The reality is simpler and far less noble. Most of us are playing a game we didn’t invent, using rules we didn’t question, hoping for rewards we don’t even really want.
Promotions, titles, respect from people we don’t like. We chase “impact” but quietly search for remote cabin rentals and our next Caribbean cruise.
We say we want to change the world, but what we actually want is to feel less exhausted, less replaceable, and a little more like we’re not losing at a game we didn’t ask to play.
“Change the world” is a terrible goal, by the way. It’s vague, bloated, and usually serves as a distraction from the real problem: we don’t know who we are outside of what we do. So we keep trying to convince ourselves it’s a great goal to “be important”.
We are not the center of the universe.
None of us are. Once we accept that, we get a little bit of power back.
Nothing we do will make us immortal, or universally admired, or permanently safe.
So we might as well do work we don’t hate. We might as well stop pretending that being “professional” means being miserable.
We might as well treat our jobs like what they are, temporary games with made-up rules—and start living like people again.
I’m writing a guide to dropping the seriousness and picking up some actual sanity.
It’s about laughing more, caring better, working smarter, and burning the whole broken system down when necessary.
Once we stop faking importance, we can finally do work that matters.
I am not a disgruntled employee.
Not everyone will appreciate this book. If you’re interested in it- reply to this e-mail.
It might even cause some tension, annoyance, I’m well aware of that.
The goal here, is to explore challenging perspectives. Value systems that might be different from ours.
I can promise that if you give these ideas a chance, it could fundamentally change the way we work.
Taking ourselves less seriously can not only give us peace, but it can make us more money.
Books like this are meant to help us think differently.
Not smile.
Because this is “serious”.