Is fun at work overrated?

And has AI killed it forever?

[Photos: Getty Images]

BY Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

For most of human history, the idea that work should be “fun” would have seemed, at best, absurd and, at worst, offensive. Consider a Roman galley slave chained to an oar, or a medieval serf bound to land and lord, or a 19th-century textile mill worker inhaling lint in a windowless factory.

Even professions we now romanticize—such as blacksmiths, sailors, or early physicians—involved long hours, high risk, and minimal autonomy. Work was, in essence, a necessary burden: dangerous, monotonous, and rarely chosen. The notion that it should also be somewhat enjoyable would have seemed like asking for dessert during a famine.

Against that backdrop, the past century, and especially the past two decades, represent a remarkable deviation. Work, at least for a segment of the global workforce, has been reimagined not merely as tolerable but as potentially fulfilling, even pleasurable. Offices began to resemble adult playgrounds. Silicon Valley firms led the charge,........

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