Labour of Love

When people say “love is not enough” they mean “the emotion of love is not enough to sustain a relationship”, and of course it isn’t. The emotion cannot lift you in and out of the bathtub when you injure yourself, drive across the country with you for the sake of your dream, wrestle with hex wrenches to put together flatpack furniture for the umpte

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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

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

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.

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

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