A Life's Work

Thoughts on seeking fulfillment and meaning

One of the things I hear from people all the time is: “I work to live, I don’t live to work.” You should enjoy the pleasures of life; why would you slave and toil all the day just to repeat the cycle in an endless loop until you die?

I believe those people are both right and wrong. They are right that there exists a wondrous diversity of things on this planet that will enhance your life’s experience. They are wrong that work and life are pitted against each other in a zero-sum game. The more you work, the less time you have to “live”.

Are you not alive when you work? Does your heart go cold and stop beating? Are you suffering so much while you work that you count the hours, minutes, and seconds till 5pm on a Friday when your metaphorical chains of employment are unshackled and you are set free onto the weekend? Do you suffer from “Sunday scaries” as you dread the start of the “work week” on Monday morning?

Our society is structured in a way that encourages young people to make decisions that will maximize their earning potential even if that means sacrificing their “quality of life” or letting go of their dreams and passions. The more you earn, the more “successful” you are in society. The more you earn, the more “freedom” you have to create the life of your dreams. The more money you save now, the “better” your retirement will be.

There is sadly no place that this phenomenon is more apparent than at the elite institutions of “higher learning” across our country. The brightest and most talented students compete against each other to secure the highest-paying jobs after college. Jobs that they will hate, not because the work is tedious or boring, but because they will not be respected and they will find little meaning in it. Did you really work this hard all your life just to become someone else’s slave? Your life is not an Excel spreadsheet. You might justify it to yourself that the “first two years are the hardest and it will get easier.” I say: Congratulations on making more money than all of your friends! You win at life!

I’ve had the opportunity to observe these people commuting to and from work. It disturbs me how many of them are glued to their devices as if the natural world and people around them didn’t even exist. They seem to live and interact with a world that shines up at them through a screen where they mindlessly “switch and match tiles” until they get to their desk at work. When I talk to these type of people, they are usually shocked and sometimes annoyed when I say that I enjoy my work. It’s like they think it shouldn’t be possible or somehow it’s unfair. Everyone is supposed to hate their job - who wouldn’t when every decision is made to maximize the amount of money you earn? And what is money if not a proxy for success and happiness?

The unfortunate fact is that people living in a “free” society usually make decisions according to that society’s economic incentive structure. The economic structure influences the social structures - class, status, networks, etc. And eventually the social networks will all have an inescapable urge to monetize at the expense of the people that make up the network. You technically are free to make any choice you want, but when the system exerts a very strong gravitational pull in one direction and takes over your attention, it may seem as if there’s nothing you can do to change your direction or even control your own thoughts. What’s the worst that could happen? Eventually you may end up void of original thoughts, not be able to articulate your own experience, or even believe that you are no longer free.

I’m not proposing that you quit your job and travel the world or move to a remote corner of the globe and live off the grid. Neither am I saying that you should spend every waking moment laboring on a project that consumes your entire being and ignore the world around you. I’m just trying to challenge your beliefs and perspective. In fact, I think the single best thing you can do is to be more (and intentionally) perceptive.

In order to find meaning, you must be perceptive. In other words, meaning is derived through perceptiveness. As the author of the above post eloquently puts it:

So what we see is that self-actualization is a flywheel; you become self-actualized by seeing reality clearly so you can design a life that fits you, and you become better at seeing reality by engaging with it head-on.

Now I don’t intend to boast about being more perceptive than others, but one thing I consider a strength is being able to build mental models and design software architecture - it is a significant part of my work after all. This requires constantly engaging in activity where there’s a tight feedback loop with reality (e.g. talking to end customers & users, reviewing others’ code, articulating thoughts and soliciting feedback, maintaining high frequency of code releases). The shorter the feedback cycles, the more accurate my perception of reality becomes over time. The more accurate my perception becomes, ultimately, the more the product aligns to our customers’ needs and the better we can predict what they may want in the future. Participating in this creative feedback loop allows me not only to see the world around me, it affords me the opportunity to help shape it.

Here’s the twist: anyone in any career can apply this same thinking to their own work. It doesn’t matter what you do as long as you engage in the world around you and are able to improve your perception and therefore self-actualize. This is what it means when someone says they love their work.

As an avid gardener, I find my work outside in the garden enormously fulfilling. It’s not the most comfortable work - it requires a healthy dose of manual labor and hours of tedious weeding. It’s also not the most rewarding work - even after all the effort to dig the garden beds, mix the compost, nurture the seeds, and erect a fence & netting to protect the plants from hungry deer, rodents, and insects, I may only be rewarded with a handful of fruits for my labor. For me, I do it because it offers me time to be more perceptive of the natural world around me. Unlike the code I write on a computer, nature behaves in unexpected ways. It’s a fluid relationship - nature gives and takes according to the oldest laws that govern our world. To participate in that relationship is to somehow take part in something much larger than just myself. Getting my hands in the dirt grounds me (literally) and allows me to recognize my humility (and human-ness).

My wife, Harri, is a great example of someone who used to “work to live”. She had a very well paying job in Sales & Trading at a prestigious and large investment bank. She was good at what she did, but she hated it. In April 2023, everything changed when we welcomed our daughter into the world and even though my wife had intended to return to her job after her maternity leave, she nearly jumped at the opportunity not to. If she wasn’t “working to live” anymore, what was she? You see, that’s a trick question. Every new parent knows taking care of a baby is a full time job with little to no time off (certainly not PTO). She wasn’t “working to live” in the sense that her new job paid handsomely and allowed us luxuries to enjoy the “finer” things in life. Not in the traditional sense. Raising a child is extremely demanding (physically, financially, and emotionally), but being a parent is not a “job” you “work”. Being a parent is your new life - it’s your new reality. Regardless of how you feel about it initially, you’re thrown into it head-on. So while I was a bit surprised at my wife’s decision to quit her stressful job and be a full-time mom, that experience of engaging head-on in one of nature’s oldest pages on life is simply priceless. It is every perceptive parent’s Magnum Opus - their life’s greatest work.

As the world we live in increasingly encroaches on our ability and freedom to perceive, think, and articulate, it’s more important than ever to directly engage with the real, natural world around us.

Cogito, ergo sum - “I think, therefore I am”