There Will Be Water

I’ll be honest, after many years of either not going on vacation at all or going and worrying about work the whole time I feel pretty silly. I used to think I worried about work so much because Work Is Important, but the truth is that many years ago I mistook a feeling for a reality and that confusion just metastasized over the course of a decade or so. Here’s where it began: Getting out of college (or maybe earlier) I felt like everyone I respected work-wise was constantly overwhelmed and out of sorts, and they carried around a projected sense of preparation-fueled defiance in the face of the unseen but constantly-described opposition. Things were insane and the onslaught was unceasing, but they were going to get through it, as if opening your email every morning was like charging once more into the castle breach.

But work isn’t like war, and I don’t think anything is like war other than war. Instead, work is a blend of two basic things: task completion and navigating human drama. The first part is generally easy because most functional work tasks are pretty basic. You have a goal or a problem to solve, you think about the goal or problem long enough to understand what has to be done, and then you tap some keys and click your mouse until it’s finished. A lot of the pain and suffering in this part comes from doing a bunch of unnecessary stuff along the way. Generally speaking, you can get to Seattle from Virginia by walking, driving, riding a bus or boat, or flying in a plane, and the level of exhaustion and amount of time it takes is dependent on which solution you choose rather than, say, the task of traveling itself. When I was younger I walked or drove everywhere and now I fly everywhere and I’m most interested in working with other people who fly everywhere too and are exploring teleportation, if that analogy makes sense.

The second part is difficult and is the reason that 99% of failed projects fail in my opinion. I don’t want to get too far into the weeds on that right now (I’ll circle back at some point soon), but suffice to say I think the world will improve quite a bit as we work together less and eat meals together more. The renaissance of automation that we’re entering should help to cut through a great deal of this sort of thing, and I’m already tanning in the unobstructed glow of doing more things myself or with very small groups of people. Human drama might make life interesting in an arts and culture sort of way, but I can tell you that watching money and media attention eat a successful team alive from the inside out is deeply heartbreaking and stupid to experience.

There’s a lot more here but I need to bounce for some post-vacation catch up so I’ll leave it at this for now: work isn’t a Shakespearean quest to matter in a grand sense. It’s just building a well and gathering oil or water from it. And vacation last week taught me that the degree to which I mentally or emotionally can’t unplug from my various work projects is the degree to which I still think a part of who I am or what makes me lovable is living somewhere down there at the bottom of those wells. But it’s strange to hit the water table or oil deposit and keep on endlessly digging, isn’t it? Or maybe it’s strange that my tendency to do that never felt concerning to me in the first place. Either way, I’m on a quest to focus more and do less, or at least ween myself off the addiction that I clearly have to stress. Happy Monday.