Labour of Love

If you’ve always been sure you don’t want kids (which I have) and if you don’t believe in god or an afterlife (which I don’t), there’s not a lot of readily available answers to the question of what the meaning of life is. The only answer I’ve been able to come up with for myself is this: to ensure that my presence on this earth makes it better than... See more

I love work, by which I mean I love the feeling of focusing my energy toward a particular goal and watching the nebulous mist between here and there slowly thin to reveal wobbly, winding stepping stones. I love the satisfaction of a certain type of exhaustion that comes from having pitted my brain and my hands against a problem and found myself a l... See more

They say that people on their deathbeds never wish they had spent more time working. I certainly believe that no one wishes, in the moments before death, that they had spent more time at the office earning a wage. But when I think about what would be weighing on my mind if I knew today were my last day to live, I suspect I’ll mostly wonder whether ... See more

Unfortunately, the work that most of us spend the bulk of our days on is not work that fills up our self-actualization tank. Mostly, we work at a job to make money so we can pay for a place to live and food to eat. We work to prove that we deserve to live.

The concept of “work” is a Rorschach test, an inkblot that you can project pretty much anything onto. There are definitions that speak of a meaningless Sisyphean grind inside an oppressive and cruel economic system designed to extract the maximum possible short-term value from all its constituent parts. There are also definitions that evoke the sin... See more