You feel like all you do is work
Work has swallowed your life. It fills your days, follows you home, occupies your evenings and haunts your weekends, until there is no room left for play, for people, for joy, for anything that is not work. You cannot remember the last time you did something that was purely for living, and you feel like a person who exists only to labor.
Ah — all work and no play makes you exactly the tired person sitting in front of me. Let me tell you what happened. The work expanded to fill the whole house of your life — like a guest given a spare room who slowly takes over the kitchen and your own bed, work spreads to fill whatever space it is allowed, so the trouble is not too much work but that you stopped defending any room from it. So defend a little room for a life — keep some rooms firmly for other things, an evening the work may not enter, a day, an hour for play and people, and hold the door, for work tests every boundary. And remember what the work was supposed to be for — a life, presumably, and if it has eaten the very life it was meant to provide, then the means has devoured the end and something is upside down. Let the work serve the life again. Where has work taken over that you'd most want to reclaim?
What changes unlock by starting
- You see work fills all the room it's given
- You defend some rooms for a life
- You hold the door against its return
- You let work serve the living again