The Life Well-Lived
When you think of "the life," do you see in your mind's eye something like the cover of The Four-Hour Work Week? Maxing and relaxing in a hammock in a tropical paradise?
NO WORK?
I can't shake this image as an ideal. It's been pounded into me my whole life. It's a cultural ideal, a dangerous one.
I hate working, or at least, I think I do. But what is work? Work is what you do to get paid. Nowhere in that definition is there any notion of whether or not you enjoy what you're doing. If I don't enjoy it, I think of it as work, and if I do enjoy it, it doesn't seem like work at all to me. So when I say I hate working, what I really mean is: I hate doing stuff I hate. Really philosophically deep, I know.
Doing stuff you hate for money, that's "work" to me. Changing your life so that you do stuff you like for money isn't easy. And there's everything in between those two poles, which means there are various levels of compromise, too.
I keep thinking about Steve Jobs's 2005 Stanford commencement speech, where he talks about how every morning, he looks at himself in the mirror and asks: If I were to die tomorrow, would I want to do what I am about to do today?
I'm thinking about this a lot, lately. What does it mean to have a life well-lived? No regrets?
Part of this is why my ultimate plan is to be a writer. Well, I'm a writer now, but what I mean is that I want to be a published fiction writer. I've always been a writer, and I've been writing already for many years. But I think I was afraid of what it would mean to really pursue writing fiction, because that kind of success is scary.
I actually do like all the marketing and blogging stuff I do, but fiction writing is my ultimate plan.
It feels good to say that. I have a good chance at a life well-lived.
