When Work Stops Loving You Back

Work can provide structure, pride, community, identity, money, mastery, and the satisfying fatigue of having done something difficult well.

It can also take every one of those gifts and use them to negotiate for more of you.

You answer one more message. Stay one more hour. Postpone one more ordinary part of being alive because the work is urgent and you are good at it.

Competence is dangerous that way. The better you are, the easier it becomes for a system to make your reliability part of its infrastructure.

Ask what the work gives back.

Not only salary. Does it still teach you? Respect you? Leave enough of you intact for the people and interests that cannot put themselves on your calendar?

You do not have to hate a job before changing your relationship with it.

Sometimes the healthiest career decision is simply refusing to let work consume the person whose name appears on the résumé.