NO. 14
You Shouldn’t “Work To Live”
* * *
“Don’t live to work. Work to live!”
Spend enough time around enough types of people and you’ll hear the above quote, or some version of it. It takes other forms, like:
- Life isn’t about work!
- [Person] cares too much about work
- It’s life-work balance, not work-life balance
There is good intention—and a real principle, which I’ll cover in a moment—behind these quotes. But there is a horrifying implication behind actually living your life according to any of these ideas.
The instant you commit to “working to live”, you cut ~30 years off your lifespan. Just like that. Worse than any amount of cigarettes, binge drinking, obesity, or many chronic diseases—and all you had to do was believe something.
Don’t believe me? Here’s a hypothetical.
- You start full-time work at 22
- You retire at 65
That’s 43 years of your life—your prime years, mind you!—spent working. About 12 of those years are weekends. We’ll discount another few years for vacations and holidays.
That leaves us with somewhere between 25 and 30 years that you are truly working. Working for, if you’re like most people, a large portion of your productive hours during the day. Those are the years that you lose the moment you decide that work is simply a meaningless tool in order to get the things you want in life.
— —
Now, a quick aside from me to you. The reason I am writing this is that I know a surprising number of people who seemingly hate even the mere idea of work. I would go as far as to say that a plurality of people I know view work to be a necessary evil. And, having spent time in Europe, I’ve noticed it’s common that you run into people who believe “What do you do for work?” to be a silly American question—another symptom of the American Dream.
This is completely baffling to me. It’s baffling because I cannot imagine a world in which I would write off such a large portion of my life as something not to be proud of, not to be discussed, not to be enjoyed—as something you just “have to do” because We Live In A Society. OK, back to the essay now. Aside over.
— —
What is the solution here?
I, for one, do not like the idea of deleting 30 years of my life with a single philosophy. I suspect you do not, either. A few thoughts on what we can do, given the reality that most of us will need to participate somehow in the money-making portion of society in order to survive.
Thought No.1 is that, if you are going to spend 20 to 30 years of your life working, you damn well better care about it. You better find something that is ultimately fulfilling, though there are ups and downs (like the rest of life). You better find something you can treat like living the same way you treat everything else.
And if you don’t? If this doesn’t resonate—if you want to buck the Capitalist Machine once and for all, fuck off, and do what you want?
Then, unless grandaddy has an estate you’ll be inhereting soon, you should find a way to do something unfulfilling for a significantly less amount of time than ‘normal work’ so that you can spend the rest of your time on the things you love. Start a company and sell it. Get lucky and join a startup that gets acquired for $1B. Become the world’s authority on pre-colonial Colombian fruit paintings. I don’t know. Something!
Either find something you find fulfilling, or spend significantly less of your life on something unfulfilling. Just please don’t resign yourself to the “necessary evil” for the majority of your life; don’t make yourself a living zombie.
* * *
“Don’t live to work. Work to live!”
Spend enough time around enough types of people and you’ll hear the above quote, or some version of it. It takes other forms, like:
- Life isn’t about work!
- [Person] cares too much about work
- It’s life-work balance, not work-life balance
There is good intention—and a real principle, which I’ll cover in a moment—behind these quotes. But there is a horrifying implication behind actually living your life according to any of these ideas.
The instant you commit to “working to live”, you cut ~30 years off your lifespan. Just like that. Worse than any amount of cigarettes, binge drinking, obesity, or many chronic diseases—and all you had to do was believe something.
Don’t believe me? Here’s a hypothetical.
- You start full-time work at 22
- You retire at 65
That’s 43 years of your life—your prime years, mind you!—spent working. About 12 of those years are weekends. We’ll discount another few years for vacations and holidays.
That leaves us with somewhere between 25 and 30 years that you are truly working. Working for, if you’re like most people, a large portion of your productive hours during the day. Those are the years that you lose the moment you decide that work is simply a meaningless tool in order to get the things you want in life.
— —
Now, a quick aside from me to you. The reason I am writing this is that I know a surprising number of people who seemingly hate even the mere idea of work. I would go as far as to say that a plurality of people I know view work to be a necessary evil. And, having spent time in Europe, I’ve noticed it’s common that you run into people who believe “What do you do for work?” to be a silly American question—another symptom of the American Dream.
This is completely baffling to me. It’s baffling because I cannot imagine a world in which I would write off such a large portion of my life as something not to be proud of, not to be discussed, not to be enjoyed—as something you just “have to do” because We Live In A Society. OK, back to the essay now. Aside over.
— —
What is the solution here?
I, for one, do not like the idea of deleting 30 years of my life with a single philosophy. I suspect you do not, either. A few thoughts on what we can do, given the reality that most of us will need to participate somehow in the money-making portion of society in order to survive.
Thought No.1 is that, if you are going to spend 20 to 30 years of your life working, you damn well better care about it. You better find something that is ultimately fulfilling, though there are ups and downs (like the rest of life). You better find something you can treat like living the same way you treat everything else.
And if you don’t? If this doesn’t resonate—if you want to buck the Capitalist Machine once and for all, fuck off, and do what you want?
Then, unless grandaddy has an estate you’ll be inhereting soon, you should find a way to do something unfulfilling for a significantly less amount of time than ‘normal work’ so that you can spend the rest of your time on the things you love. Start a company and sell it. Get lucky and join a startup that gets acquired for $1B. Become the world’s authority on pre-colonial Colombian fruit paintings. I don’t know. Something!
Either find something you find fulfilling, or spend significantly less of your life on something unfulfilling. Just please don’t resign yourself to the “necessary evil” for the majority of your life; don’t make yourself a living zombie.