12 Comments

I enjoyed this read so much. I hope one day you'll read the book Garden City. In fact I'll send it to you. It's about exactly this. We were not made to have our work be our identity or our meaning. But once we off load those burdens from work, work in fact can be a beautiful thing.

And I look forward to continuing to read the beautiful things you post here!

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Damn, what a power piece 👏🏽 So much of what you say speaks to me. I especially loved these nuggets:

"Work can be the way I join my husband in bringing alive our dreams as a family, and work can be the way I get away from the expectation of babymaking and caregiving. Work is my doorway to new social situations, my license to travel, and my gateway to new, unfamiliar worlds."

"Even at its worst, getting to work is freedom. At its best, getting to work is self-discovery and self-care."

Work is a means to define myself beyond the identity-roles of wife, mother, caregiver. Yet, I don't define my identity through work.

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Really enjoyed this piece and the complexities you're addressing here. Both having the freedom to work while also trying to balance a pressure to overwork!

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As an afterthought, I created a short concept book that is available to read online that I have barely mentioned to anyone. It's about the value and joy of just Being. The fact that I have barely mentioned it to a soul proves your point about non-work being taboo. But here's a link to it in case you're interested. www.unbrandedself.com (I recommend you turn your sound off while reading it, otherwise you hear distracting page turning sounds.)

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I certainly knew this was true in North America, that enjoying life outside of work is basically taboo, but I didn't know that went on in other cultures. The work expectation you describe is completely baked into my operating system. So much so that I don't even consciously know it's an option to do something else until I get a thoughtful reminder like this. This is a brave article to be talking about working being optional! How dare you? ha ha. I'm grateful today for your daring. Maybe I'll go for a walk in the woods.

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