«What, then, constitutes the alienation of labor?
First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.» 1/3

«He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague.» 2/3

«External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another.» 3/4

«Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity – so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.»

– Estranged Labour, in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 by Karl Marx

As heard on Thinking Allowed, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b2kpm0

Problem still unsolved. Sadly, I had never heard of this passage before. That’s because I never managed to read much of Marx except for the communist manifest. But that quote totally resonates with me. And it’s inversion is what we see a lot of these days: people telling each other to do the things they love to do, to find a job that agrees with them. As if such a thing existed! If people do it for love, they’ll do it for free. That’s not work.

I don’t work for the love of it and earn something on the side, as if by lucky accident. I do it for the money.
And to think that we should love work is to think along the lines of Big Brother in 1984 by George Orwell. You don’t only get punished but you must want it, too.
Now, of course I am happy to have found a job that seems better to me than all the others given the money I earn, the people I work with, the flexibilities I am granted – but I am still alienated. This is not me.