Can we navigate fulfillment, work, and societal expectations to find a meaningful life?

About three weeks ago, the celestial dance carried me through a solstice. Here in the northern hemisphere, it was the shortest day of the year. I know well that late December is cold, but it’s usually late January and early February when it’s coldest. The general weather lags a couple of months behind that celestial dance. Which is exactly why so many cultures pay attention to the celestial alignments: What’s directly in front of us tells one story, but those alignments accurately tell us what is coming.

Without realising it, I got to the point where I was emotionally drained and disengaged from my work – work that I normally love. I felt like I was going through the motions, instead of feeling my usual level of passion and enthusiasm. I started to get irritated by little things. I was utterly depleted. It took me a while to recognise what was going on and why I was feeling this way.

~ Debbie Sorensen, from How to recover from burnout

Ouch, Sorensen. You see me. I should just remove the quotation markup and switch from British English to American spelling…

Without realizing it, I got to the point where I was emotionally drained and disengaged from my work – work that I normally love. I felt like I was going through the motions, instead of feeling my usual level of passion and enthusiasm. I started to get irritated by little things. I was utterly depleted. It took me a while to recognize what was going on and why I was feeling this way.

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

~ Joan Didion

I do love the cut of Didion’s sentences. But I say for myself: I don’t marvel at the painstaking records I keep, I revel in them. I’m deeply thankful that I learned to write down my thinking— to tip out my mind as it were. Just today (as I do nearly every day) I was reading where I was and what I was doing exactly 10 years ago. The best day to start journaling was like 20 years ago; If you missed that day, then today would be a close second.

It is important to understand that the stored-program design is not only the most fundamental principle of modern computing – it also already contains a deep insight into the limits of machine learning: namely, that there is nothing that such a machine can do in principle that it cannot in principle figure out for itself. Turing saw this implication and its practical potential very early on. And he soon became very interested in the question of machine learning, several years before the stored-program design was first implemented in an actual machine.

~ Sebastian Sunday Grève, from AI’s first philosopher

I had the opportunity to stand just inside his office at Bletchley Park. It was basically one of many identical offices. I was struck by how nondescript and generic it was (and remains.) It was a reminder that it doesn’t matter where you do your work.

The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.

~ Jessica Hische

I will admit to using Hische’s point as a compass. If I feel I’m procrastinating, or hiding from something . . . I try to eliminate the thing I’m avoiding. Life is short.

That’s the only test that counts. It’s not how hard you work, it’s what happens if you stop. If quitting means real hardship for you or your family, you have a job. If you keep at it even though you could spend the rest of your life skipping rocks at your house by the lake, you have a hobby.

I’ve got nothing against hobbies. The Weekly Sift is a hobby. One way to describe the Marxist vision of Utopia is that we’d all be hobbyists, and the world’s work would get done by people who just wanted the satisfaction of doing it. (That vision even works sometimes: Wikipedia, open source software, and so on.)

~ Doug Muder from, Rich People Don’t Have Jobs

There are too many directions I can think to go in, from that, Muder. I’ll go in the direction of “open source software.”

Have you ever seen xkcd? It’s a serial comic strip, and perfectly safe for all ages. In fact, it’s downright heart warming and educational. If you’ve never seen xkcd— Uh, I’m really sorry, but you’re about to waste hours. It was 15(?), maybe 20(?!), or more (?!?!) years ago when I stumbled over it. I started at the beginning and read them all up to the one for the day I found it. Important: All xkcd comics have hover-text, which you read after reading the cartoon to get the best part. There’s even a whole site dedicated to explaining xkcd cartoons. I digress. Where was I?

Here’s, Dependency, which will teach an important lesson about that open source software Muder mentioned. Munroe drew it after a piece of software, shown in that cartoon, broke and caused global havoc. There’s an xkcd cartoon for— well, for everything. You didn’t ask, but my favorite is, Standards. I just lol’d again looking it up. (I’m the nerd on the left.)

Long-term consistency trumps short term intensity.

~ Bruce Lee

I’ve done many, insane, long stretches of effort. I’ve learned two things: The first is that it’s very easy to hide in, “I’ve always just done it.” That’s absolutely not a reason to continue doing anything. Don’t hide in the doing. The second thing is to do the work only for the work’s sake. It can be a job or a hobby (per Muder’s point above) but you must not expect adulation or recompense because that way lies indignation and arrogance.

If you think about it, though, it makes sense. Even if you don’t believe in the strict textbook version of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, it’s pretty obvious that even after a society provides most of its people with material security, many people still care about life and have ambitions and desires and work very hard. There are social needs that are, in some sense, on top of the physical ones. Maslow thought that these needs were A) love and acceptance, and B) esteem and respect. David Marx rolls these ideas, and others, into a unifying concept: social status.

~ Noah Smith, from “Status and Culture”, by W. David Marx

Our ability to find meaning depends on embracing the mundane and the profound. It doesn’t matter if some significant effort is done of necessity, passion, procrastination, or outright hiding. Regardless, the work and hobbies we pursue do ultimately define us. The meaning of life is in navigating the ebb and flow of our energy and motivation.

Until next time, thanks for reading.

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