On “What I Do” and “Work”
Originally posted 10/13/2023 https://johnsonhs.medium.com/on-what-i-do-and-work-81927fc3207d
I was recently writing an extended answer to the questions “What do you do? What do you like about your work?” and thought I’d share publicly.
I usually encounter a few different notions of what work is. One is an activity with the primary intention of making money. Another is work as a form, a thing that you orient your life around, a source of identity. Another is an activity with the primary intention of contribution and creating value/joy/goodness in the world.
The first, financial sort of work I’m only interested in if/when necessary; given my current fortunate state of financial affairs, this isn’t a concern of mine, so I don’t intend to do any of this unless some major change occurs. I don’t have much interest in the second form of work, as an activity that gives me an identity — I have a pretty fluid sense of identity that I’m not too attached to, and many things contribute to my self concept. The third sort of work, about creating value/joy/goodness, I’ve intentionally and explicitly given myself permission to not concern myself with over the last few years; interestingly, I’ve found myself organically pulled to doing things that do at least a little bit of this.
So with all of that said, by most definitions of work, what I do has either a little or nothing to do with my “work”. Wanted to clarify because the question implies that the two are the same or at least closely related, where for me they aren’t really.
What do I do? At the object level, I’ve done many things over the last few years — this thread briefly names most of them. A level up from that, there’s been a bunch of major themes:
Traveling/exploring the world
Trying out different lifestyles/ways of living
Learning hobbies/skills
Having fun
Coliving
Scoping out various possible places to live
Inner and relational work
Transforming my relationship to my mother
Spending quality time with family
Getting in touch with and developing a mature relationship to my emotions
Building greater closeness and emotional intimacy with friends in person and remotely, including shifting existing relationships
Developing my capacity to build community and closeness
Cultivating courage
Cultivating presence
Supporting others with their inner work
Getting in touch with and acting on desire.
A level up from that would be fucking around and finding out, building a deeper relationship to myself, developing greater self understanding, understanding of the world around me, and how the two interact. A level up from that is simply following aliveness and desire — doing whatever I want/feel called to, whatever it is that I want at the time of deciding.
To be a bit more legible, some of the things that I do fall in the last bucket of work — stuff that creates value/joy/goodness, which could probably become the first financial bucket if necessary.
One example is coliving: I’ve organized multiple large group houses at this point — one was 7–15 friends living in houses across the US for a month at a time for ~5 months, called Camp Covid. Another was in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, where I got 30+ friends to come through over the course of a month for my birthday. Another was 12 friends in a house in Colombia for 2 weeks, collaboratively organized with 2 other friends. I’ve always enjoyed bringing friends together since middle school — my calling card was planning parties at the house of my friend on his behalf, and I especially enjoy doing so for occasions like my birthday. I’m always transparent about costs and split them evenly and fairly between all participants. But if I was suddenly hurting for a bit of money, I imagine I could charge everyone $100 more and then I’d have a few grand.
Another example is crewing, which are small groups of friends that meet regularly, usually with the primary intention of emotional support, building trust, closeness, and connection. I’ve started more crews than anyone else I know — an essay I wrote is referenced as a resource on the Microsolidarity site! For me, they’re wonderful sources of support, as well as an excuse to stay in contact with, and even deepen relationships with friends remotely. Given that I’m away from most of my friends most of the time, this is priceless for me. I simply have no interest in profiting off my friends, and am actively disgusted at the idea of commoditizing my friendships. Yet I know of multiple companies trying to facilitate these as businesses; directly adjacent are things like men’s groups, for which there are many for profit businesses.
Another example is the Internal Family Systems therapy (IFS) sessions I exchange with friends. IFS is a modality that I’ve done a bunch of, and that I credit with helping me overcome many internal blocks, shifting my relationship to myself, and transforming a lot of shame and fear into self love. It’s been foundational for most of my massive changes in the last year, like the shifts in my relationship with my mom, as well as my general ability to connect more deeply with existing friends and strangers, alike. I mostly do the sessions as exchanges with friends that also have experience — I’ll give a session then I’ll receive a session. Occasionally I’ll offer a session to a friend that’s struggling on a one off basis — I’m wary of introducing a lasting client/therapist dynamic into any of my friendships. But one friend mentioned that his session with me felt as helpful as sessions he does with his $200/hour therapist. So I suspect this could be work of the financial variety if I needed the money (or to be a bit more legible to someone that doesn’t understand my lifestyle).
Similarly, I offer coaching to people about improving relationships with parents. I started offering this after realizing how positively and foundationally shifting my relationship to my mom benefitted me. I find these sessions really meaningful for that reason, and they often feel quite relevant, as my relationship with my mom is certainly still far from perfect. I just charge $10 a session, mostly out of curiosity to see if people would pay me, which they do. Clients have tried to pay me more and I’ve refused.
At the time of writing, I’m considering taking a CTO position (lol), but not in a way that anyone else I know relates to a traditional job. When initially approached, my immediate answer was “no thanks”, but I decided to try and be open minded. In my reflection, I was like “ok well I like crews, and I’ve been curious how having a shared project fosters greater connection/trust/closeness”. So I’ve communicated that I’m interested only in the parts of the job that overlap with that. I’ve been clear that the business is at most a secondary concern of mine — what I care about is the people and the relationships and the connections. I’ve communicated that the position will not be a focal point of my life at all — at least out the gate, it would have the same amount of importance as any one of my crews, something I’d prioritize 1–2 hours per week, and that I would drop if it didn’t align with my personal goals/values. I’m not interested in writing a single line of code. They’re still wanting to move forward with me, so we’ll see what happens there.
I suppose I’d conclude by saying that most notions of work have little to no use in describing what I do — I do what I want.
I want to separately call out how I orient towards “work as a source of meaning and purpose”, because it requires more breakdown. I’ll start by saying that it simply doesn’t resonate for me. It implies that there’s some set of activities that are meaningful and purposeful, and some that aren’t, by some outside, objective measure. Such activities are paired with a felt sense of meaning, where other times are characterized by deep existential dread.
At this point, I don’t worry about “is what I’m doing meaningful/purposeful?” I don’t have existential crises anymore — I’m very at peace with a lack of objective meaning/purpose, that in a literal sense we’re floating space dust. I largely resonate with meaning as outlined here, as well as “Man’s Search for Meaning”.
Meaning is something that I feel when I have a coherent, resonant narrative about what I do. It’s a feeling that I can generate more of by meaning making, which largely looks like contextualizing what I do in a broader narrative. I can make meaning out of anything, though certainly some activities feel intuitively more meaningful than others. For example, acting out of love and with love for people I care about tends to be a deeply meaningful activity. My need for meaning is like my need for food — if I’m hungry, I can just go get some food.
So the real question is — what do I want to do? Where’s my desire and aliveness? Where there’s a strong correlation between things I want to do more and things that feel more meaningful. Given that I’m in the fortunate position of only doing things that I want to do, everything I do feels meaningful to varying degrees. Where even the same activity might feel more or less desirable and meaningful, depending on the context. So in this frame of work, I suppose you could say that everything I do is work, but that feels like it’s missing the point.
I’ll mention that this was not always the case — for most of my life I’ve been obsessed with philosophy, the “Good”, positive psychology/human flourishing, trying to figure out what I should do, what would be most meaningful, etc. And even for the first few years since leaving work, I constantly felt like I needed to justify what I was doing as meaningful, from a place of fear/defensiveness. (“is it actually meaningful?”).
But something shifted in the last year or so to simply not worrying about this stuff anymore. I suspect underpinning the shift was accessing love from my mom, greater self love, self understanding, and self respect. My previous obsession came from “maybe if I figure out how to do ‘Good’/’flourish’/meaningful work, I’ll finally be whole, lovable, good as I am”. And as I cultivated self love/understanding/respect, I now just believe that what I do is meaningful, and don’t need to do anything to prove it.