Work to Live, Instead of Live to Work: How I’m Doing It
My generation lives to work, but I want to work to live.
We compulsively check our calendars between beer water pong sessions. We refresh our work emails at the beach. We respond to Slack messages at our family barbecues.
Many of my friends have been working for less than a year and already feel tired of the grind. Instead of the professional fulfillment that company recruitment posters promised us, our young careers are already punctuated by burn out and disdain.
We love our unlimited vacations and December holidays, but after a few months of high energy, we’re back down the doldrums.
To be completely candid, the past 3 years have been stressful for me. Since I started working, I’ve faced almost every work situation imaginable:
Started working in a tech startup before I graduated
Blogged and did freelance writing while working full-time
Quit to run my own consulting business
Went back to work at a non-profit
Started (and ended) a fully remote job without ever meeting my coworkers in person
My work experience feels like a volatile Bitcoin graph. I’m tired of feeling like I’m being pitched back and forth from high to abysmally low states of job excitement every few months. I want it to be more like the predictable, upward trend of the S&P 500.
Throughout my experience, I’ve been forced to figure out healthy coping strategies. In this essay, I outline an approach that turns a toxic, work-centric life into one where work is just one aspect of a creative, satisfying life. My hope is that this will get you and I to our 40th year at work with more excitement than when we started.
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Rule #1: Use the professional to light up the personal
In our quest to break out of professional mediocrity, social obscurity, and financial deficiency, we check our interests, our creativity, and our personal lives at the door.
If we’re not working, we aim to develop financially or professionally-beneficial side hustles.
If we take breaks, it’s only so that we can work better. Or at least listen to a podcast so we stay productive.
After I quit my first full-time position, I hated jobs and vowed to chart my own path and never to work for anyone else ever again. Instead, I went into my own consulting business and ended up giving myself another job that paid less, but demanded more.
I wish I understood Rule #1 then.
The truth is, while a job can be soul-sucking, it also gave me the financial resources to do everything I’d always wanted to do as a kid:
Go take flying lessons.
Finally learn to play the drums.
Get my PADI scuba diving license.
Buy and play all the video games I want.
Get a ClassPass membership and attend dance, boxing, or martial classes.
Understanding Rule #1 made me OK with “getting a job.” So I got a new job last year. Then I lost it after 10 months. Curses.
Fortunately, I never neglected my personal life even as I worked my butt off. While this meant I had to figure out what to do with an extra 40 hours of my week, it didn’t disrupt the other 128.
I had friends I saw at least once a week. They were there for me when sh*t hit the fan.
I played ultimate every weekend, watched Korean dramas, and hung out with my best friend to train her new puppy.
At the same time, the burn out I felt couldn’t be cured just by spending time with the people I cared about, or by doing hobbies I enjoyed. I didn’t have the energy to get up in the morning, even if it was to watch an episode of my beloved Hospital Playlist. Writing – what used to be my happy place – became a struggle, too. I needed a new, exciting reason to get up in the morning.
I needed to rekindle my creative fire.
Rule #2: Write for yourself every day
Writing is the foundation of all creative work and most knowledge work. But oftentimes, we put too much pressure on ourselves to turn the blinking cursor into a viral essay.
My morning pages practice is designed to depressurize that. Morning pages is a cornerstone of Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way. The book contains a 12-week course “in discovering and recovering your creative self,” and in it she writes,
“The morning pages are three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness. [They] are meant to be, simply, the act of moving the hand across the page and writing down whatever comes to mind. Nothing is too petty, too silly, too stupid, or too weird to be included.”
Thankfully, I’ve been doing my morning pages on and off for 6 years now. As of this writing, I’m on my 12th morning pages journal. Morning pages helped me remember why I started writing in the first place: because it was therapeutic, refreshing, and fun. Here’s how I do them:
As soon as I set my coffee on my desk, I crack open my notebook, pick up my Muji pen, and start writing.
The 3 pages take me at least 45 minutes to do. 30 minutes if I’m particularly anxious.
I write 3 longform morning pages by hand every weekday. I give myself the option to take weekends off.
They’re meant to be “spiritual windshield wipers” or “to cage the monkey mind”, as Tim Ferriss calls them.
My morning pages help me reflect on the previous day, plan for the present, and put down my thoughts for the future. Doing them each day gives me confidence that I’m doing exactly what I need to do for the day and that if I do go off track, my practice will help me get back.
Rule #3: Schedule & protect a weekly date with yourself
The other essential The Artist’s Way practice is a weekly artist’s date. Julia writes,
“An artist date is a block of time, perhaps two hours weekly, especially set aside and committed to nurturing your creative consciousness, your inner artist.”
There are no rules for these dates, except that…
They have to be done alone, between you and your inner child. No friends, significant others, or podcasts allowed. (You don’t listen to a podcast together on date night with your boyfriend or girlfriend, do you?)
It has to be fun for your inner kid. You may think you want to spend the evening reading a self-help book, but that’s adult stuff. Try again.
Artist’s dates are a weekly 2-3 hour excuse to have Me time. I have a recurring calendar invite for Thursday evenings. I let myself move it around, depending on what I want to do that week as long as the event stays within the week. Here are a few activities I’ve done over:
Watched Korean Cold Noodle Rhapsody while slurping takeout noodles from my favourite pho place
Seen Marvel’s Shang-Chi at 4:00 PM on a weekday afternoon then had dinner at one of my favourite Korean restaurants by myself (I even sprung for the theatre with the moving seats, Dolby Atmos sound system, and UltraAVX screen. I had a smile on my face the entire time.)
Spent an afternoon learning the theory behind DJ-ing with Questlove’s MasterClass
You see, since high school, I’d slowly whittled away hobbies, interests, and dreams that didn’t directly support my career.
I stopped reading fiction.
I stopped hanging out with “unambitious” friends.
I refused to watch YouTube or binge Netflix shows — even the ones I enjoyed.
As a recovering workaholic and productivity nut, this simple weekly practice helped me re-splice the severed connection with The Kid inside.
Don’t forget your creativity when you leave for work
We need our creativity to write career-defining memos, solve trillion-dollar problems with 10x code, and market our products and services, but oftentimes we forget two important things:
We work to live, not the other way around.
We do our best work when we have fun.
Long-term professional success and fulfillment is an offshoot of doing what’s “play for you and work for others”. The creative process I outlined is designed to help you find work that fulfills you or to carve out a fulfilling life if you’re stuck at a deadend job. By using our excitement, enjoyment, and creativity as our north star, we can build practices and systems to avoid the stop-start nature of burn out.