Alain de Botton’s School of Life takes a different approach to resolving the notions and paradoxes we hold that make us unhappy. Regarding work:
The modern meaning of life is that our deepest interests should find external expression in a form that others will find useful, and that will bring in sufficient funds for a bourgeois life. The ambition is enormous, beautiful and worthy of solemn respect for its trickiness. It is only in very recent history that we’ve even attempted not just to make money at work, but also – extraordinarily – to be happy there as well. How deeply peculiar the idea would have sounded to most of our ancestors: especially the aristocrats who never worked and the working classes who would mostly strongly have wanted not to. Happy work is the genius, malevolent invention of the bourgeoisie.
There is something to be said for work that has discrete fences and boundaries, one that does not intrude on your vacation, your evening, or your sleep.