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writing for godot

What is meaningful work?

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Written by Jeannette de Beauvoir   
Tuesday, 04 March 2014 21:40
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. We spend so much of our lives immersed in our professions that in many ways our work has become our life. We may not like that fact; we may do what we can to convince ourselves that “real life” is what we do outside of work; but the reality is that the number of hours spent earning a living does, in fact, add up to that living itself.

So it makes sense that at some point, most people need to examine what their work entails, and if it is, indeed, how they want to spend their time, energy, and creativity.

Does this mean that you should quit your job, go volunteer to work in a shelter kitchen or start a new company? Of course not. We all have obligations. People have education debts, mortgage or rent payments, financial obligations that require a certain level of income. So changing jobs, finding fulfilling work, is never as simple as it seems.

But it's still a topic that merits thought, even if it means starting planning now for something that might not happen for a few (or quite a few) years.Like most novelists, were I to live from my fiction alone, I'd starve pretty quickly! So for a long time I did other things to earn my living while writing on the side – long after midnight, on Sunday mornings before going to Mass, during lunch breaks. And I realized that I wasn't happy confining what I was increasingly seeing as my "real life" to the margins of my daily life.

So I stopped teaching and started writing for money – doing business writing, technical writing, marketing writing. It's not as fulfilling as fiction, but it does hone my craft, allow me to get better at what I do... and still pay the rent. Now I can write fiction whenever I choose, as long as I know that the other writing will have to be fit in somewhere there as well.It's not a tactic that can work for everyone, but it's one way to approach the question.

What would make your work-life more meaningful? Is there something that you can do now that would take it in a more meaningful direction? What about going back to school to study something you've always wanted to do? What about using the education that you have now to try something different – what if you were to think creatively about the different things that you could do with your present education and experience?

How does your work reflect your values? Is there something that you could do differently so that it is more aligned with who you feel yourself to be? Does that mean starting your own company, or joining one that is already doing what you think you should be doing?There are no easy answers to any of these questions.

But life without change and growth will eventually stagnate, and your work-life is no different from any other part of your life. Start taking some small steps now to feel better about how you spend your time, your training, and your energy, and you may find when it's time to retire that you don't really want to, after all.
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