Last night I read this post about Beagle Bros software and it reminded me of the most important thing to me about work: joy.
Without joy, what is there? Working out of necessity is, well, often a necessity and this work does not require joy because the discipline is external. But there's no natural law that prevents necessary work from being joyful, that mechanism is a purely unnatural, human-invented behavior.
I believe that care is a prerequisite for joy, which means that it is impossible to find joy in work that you don't care about. Care is a complicated subject on it's own, but it's also simple when you don't try to think about it and instead simply feel it. When you are actually doing something, ask your self "do I care about this?". If the answer is indeterminate, try "why do I care about this?". If you don't have a positive answer to these questions, it's unlikely that you will find any joy in what you are doing, or at least in how you're currently doing it.
There's a lot of money to be made by coercing people to do work they don't care about, in fact you could say that might be the foundation of the entire industrial revolution: increase profit by decreasing care. It's not hard to see how in an environment like that the joy of work was slowly extinguished over the last century or two.
Many have found a route around this by striking-out into new fields on or just beyond the reach of pure industrialization. This is where I was for quite awhile writing software for personal computers. At the moment that once new pasture has been fenced-in by industrialization, and it has been awhile since I have been able to make a living working on something I care about.
No Joy.
But I have reasons to believe that there is a way out of this trap. Writing the book and discussing the ideas behind it with a handful of friends has given me some hope that there are still people in the world who want the personal computing experience that I grew up with. The result of last week's poll have also boosted my spirits and encouraged me to pursue this, and the reflections on the Beagle Bros. from the post that kicked this whole thing off has added more fuel to the fire.
Each of these things reminds me of why I care about personal computers, and making things for the people who work with them. From that care springs joy, and in my experience, joyful work can accomplish anything.
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026