Devote Yourself to the Cause of Your Life

For most of my life I was pretty useless. 

My career in tech consisted of creating slides for the pre-meeting, tweaking said slides for the actual meeting, and conducting the obligatory post-meeting debrief *gags*. Some of my finance-oriented roles had me do more spreadsheet work, but the workflow was the same. At times, I would be on the strategy team or would be doing work for VC funds, but the job was basically identical. Perform analysis, convince people it was right, move on to the next thing—all without ever having a stake in the idea. Being a glorified intellectual butler was a great way to make money.

I despised every minute of it. I abhorred making slides. I loathed spreadsheets. I detested the political dance of managing the founder's ego. In short, I hated everything I was doing all day. But I was addicted to what doing those things gave me. I liked the power and the prestige and the money. Oh god, the money. It bought me things I had never had—weekend trips to Machu Picchu, $120 joggers from Lululemon, Barry’s Bootcamp classes three times a week. It was intoxicating living.

Then Covid hit, and all of a sudden, I went through what a therapist would politely describe as a “brain go breaky breaky busted” experience. I realized I was miserable. Confined at home, thinking about how stupid my day-to-day tasks were, drove me (literally) mad. My anxiety spiked through the roof, and existential dread became a close friend. I had to get off the treadmill.

Thankfully, Covid gave me that excuse to reinvent myself.

Unsure of what to do, I started writing a Substack like everyone else in 2020. This new job—a generous term seeing as no one wanted me to do this nor was paying me—made me far happier than I had any right to be. All of the stuff that made my previous role palatable—the money and power—was gone. But, magically, I was content.

So, I decided I was going to be a writer. 

Author’s note: at this point I had, like, 25 free subscribers. I was too ignorant to realize what a stupid idea this was. 

I am not arguing that everyone should pursue a career as a creative professional. There are (probably) people who are happy being a slide guy or spreadsheet girlie. I’m not proposing a framework or “get happy fast” route for your career. I don’t know your life and am not arrogant enough to tell you how to live it. 

What I am arguing is that there is a better way of working. This is my case for what I call the builder’s state of being: when you revel in the day-to-day minutia, the tedious tasks that make up your job. 

The point of work is doing the labor, not delegating it away. When we focus excessively on productivity, when our biggest concern is on how to “scale ourselves,” we miss the point of work—and, really, life—which is to find meaning in the daily tasks that consume our time. Like a bike chain catching a gear, there is a deeply satisfying *cachunk* that happens in your brain when you go from enjoying the outcome of your labors to enjoying the process of them.

While the money and influence writing brings me is great, I loved it before any of that came. Much of my success is attributable to sheer dumb luck, but a decent chunk of it was that I reveled in the craft. The physical act of pounding on my mechanical keyboard accelerates my heart rate. The knife fight between my emotion and my intellect when I’m writing prose puts a smile on my face. I will write for the rest of my life and you’ll have to kill me to stop me. I love it.