How much should you love your work?

To quote Carrie, the most exciting, challenging and significant relationship of all is the one you have with your...work?

The last three weekends of April happened to be what is known in Italy as a ponte, when a holiday falls just before or after a weekend and so a bridge is made to create a usually four-day vacation.

This concept, in abstract, sounds like a cultural fantasy—three weeks in a row of a brief departure from the eternal stress that is the hamster wheel, three weeks to enter calmly into a dream-like state. But by Friday of the third ponte, I welcomed a return to normal life, to the more rigid strictures of work. Sure, I relished spending time with the people I loved, often doing absolutely nothing but together, but even I sometimes longed to immerse myself once more in the cleaner, analytical world of my work, in which all that was required of me was attempting to shape the contents of my brain and my reporting into a coherent depiction on the page.

My life in Rome was constantly characterized by this tension, a precarious teetering between working too much and then living too much in a way that made me wonder whether the so-called work-life balance was actually a myth. And yet, in the periods in which I went out frequently, jumping from aperitivo to dinner or a lecture to a party, I was dogged by the distinct pang of something missing. Emerging from the library after a day engrossed in my writing felt magical—it felt right. I never left even the best parties feeling that inner sense of purpose, that maybe my life, in some way, had been realized.

When I reread that paragraph, it sounds, even to me, like I’m trying to tell one story, one wholly in capital-letter adjectives—Protestant work ethic of America, Good, Sacred, Correct, socializing and spending time with friends, Vapid, Non-Intellectual, Unimportant. But that’s not a story I believe, and it’s certainly not one by which I’ve lived my life. No, for a long time, as my parents will gladly attest to, I believed that I could do everything—there was not a party I would miss, not a phone conversation I couldn’t have, not a job I wouldn’t take. This, of course, left me in an eternal state of never really being present because I quite literally couldn’t do 20 things at once, let alone do them well. (There’s a reason my university is known for its “work hard, play hard” mentality.) I wasn’t really excelling at anything.

But in 2020, a global pandemic forced us all to recalibrate our relationship with work, whether we were ready to or not. In the United States, that led many of us to ‘quiet quit,’ theoretically a subtle act of resistance that allowed us to do our job in name only without actually caring about the daily obligations. If work was going to ruin our lives, both physically and emotionally, then we had the answer: we were no longer leaning in, Sheryl Sandberg! It was time to lean out. “You are still performing your duties, but you are no longer subscribing to the hustle culture mentally that work has to be our life,” said one TikToker. A 2022 Guardian article on quiet quitting references Bartleby, the Scrivener, the title character of a Herman Melville short story who famously refuses seemingly rhetorical requests with “I would prefer not to.” A 26-year-old book warehouse handler interviewed by the New York Times in 2022 described the paradise that awaited the other side of quiet-quitting like this: “I like the go-go-go, but I don’t have anxiety attacks. I am good at my job, but then I go home and I don’t think about it.”

I, unfortunately, had missed this memo. The world was quiet quitting, and yet I found myself ever closer to work obsession, in the midst of a major career shift from newspaper reporter to freelance journalist. In my first year, I had an almost manic approach to getting new work that frightened even me. I lived for the emotional rollercoaster of each day, emailing with a new editor, getting a pitch accepted, the will-they-or-won’t-they of each potential work relationship. I was buoyed by the possible dopamine rush that awaited me with the confirmation of a new assignment or a new byline.

This yielded results, yes, but I wasn’t entirely sure it was healthy. I was predicating my entire self-worth on one aspect of my life—the prestige of my career, as evidenced by externals. My inevitable rock bottom came with my first ever byline in the publication that had been my dream as a college journalist. Now, finally, I could silence the voice in my head that said “once X happens, I will be Objectively Successful.” Now X had occurred, so I had done it, right?

Of course not. My unvarnished joy at reaching this life goal lasted about three days—literally, I counted—before my own overwhelming sense of inadequacy crept in. This was, on the one hand, incredibly deflating and, on the other hand, incredibly useful. I had now seen for myself what everyone else seemed to know—there was no external accomplishment that was going to heal my inner wounds or make me a whole person.

It was moving to Italy that, in many ways, forced my hand again. Here, what I had taken for granted in the U.S., that people could place me within a certain schematic, was no longer entirely true. At parties, I introduced myself as a freelance journalist, and a set of questions almost invariably followed. What do you write about? Who do you write for? I never felt I had any easy answers, both because my career was in a period of transition and I worried about depicting myself as either too impressive (not true) or not impressive enough (perhaps too much Imposter Syndrome). In a strangely dissociative turn, my work started to become completely bifurcated from my social life, so much so that I often felt like the people I worked with had no idea of my daily reality and the people I spent time with had no real idea of my work life.

For some time, I wondered whether this was the inevitable conclusion to my flawed original narrative—I had put too much stock in my work, which was bound to disappoint me, and I would now have to shift that effort to my relationships and my life. My work was what I did, not who I was. But that answer never really fit.

The problem is that, after three years here, in which I have leaned in, leaned out, prioritized personal projects over official, paid work and attempted to create a community and learn a new language and culture, I see that I am often happiest in the moments in which my work fulfills me. And I don’t quite know how to square that with the other universal truths I find to be true—that our friends and our family matter terribly, that it is important to be a caring and loving partner and friend, that we should not sacrifice our well-being for that of an institution. I worry often that I am merely deluding myself (this is essentially my Principal Fear), putting my efforts into work because it feels emotionally safer. Would it be better for me to divest myself entirely?

I am thankfully not the only one asking these very questions, albeit often from the opposite direction. In April 2023, a person in their early 30s readying for a cross-country move wrote in to

Haley Nahman

’s “Dear Baby” advice column series asking about braindead jobs. The writer yearns to let “any traditional job go,” noting how hard it is to “think outside the box and step away from what feels familiar.”

“Am I allowed to do this? Is this idiotic? Am I idealizing having a job with minimal mental/emotional strain because I’m burned out, but will find myself braindead after a month?,” they wonder.

I think we’ve all felt like this at certain times in our lives, when the desire to get off the ladder or the hamster wheel or the endless push of up-up-up or more-more-more feel so relentless that just clocking in and clocking out suddenly becomes the obvious solution. But Nahman’s response offers an important counter to the idea that a braindead job will offer you some sort of liberation. Perhaps it’s just another kind of prison.

“It may sound easier to give nothing—to promise to keep your face pointed at the screen, and nothing more, to do ‘braindead’ work—but I actually think it’s a lot harder. This isn’t a bid against work that others might deem unglamorous or boring (most jobs can be interesting to the right people), it’s a bid against apathy generally. I don’t think checking out for long stretches of time is good for the human spirit.”

I found myself returning to a People interview with actress Niecy Nash, describing the difference between a “hobby” and a “calling.”

“A hobby is something you do sometimes for fun,” she says. “The call on your life is such a burning desire that you would get up and do it for free if you had to. You will move different in a calling.”

I realize that encouraging people to work for free gets really to the start and the heart of this whole mess, which is that if we over-prioritize work, it quickly becomes exploitative. We are immediately told ‘Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life,’ something that many of us know is not, and will never be, true. But if we as a culture have overcorrected, as Nahman says and which I’m inclined to agree with, then where does the happy medium lie?

In a bid to confront my general habit of using myself as the chief anecdote, I decided to reach out to a number of Italian and American friends in my general age range, hoping to get their take on what they saw as the ideal relationship with work. Perhaps their insights would help me understand how our generation is handling this tension.

Across men and women, those in their 20s and 30s, Italians living in Italy and Americans living in either country, there were certain trends. Almost all of them had made some kind of recalibration of their own, forced to reckon with how their work had effectively taken over their lives and wasn’t necessarily paying them back. One, a 38-year-old Italian journalist, said she realized, at a certain point, that if work wasn’t even going to give her financial flexibility and purchasing power, then why was she still dedicating her all, canceling her social engagements to always be at the office?

Others had a more insidious psychological relationship with work. One, a 36-year-old Italian project manager in social innovation, felt she had developed a near-addiction to the positive validation that came out of a successful working encounter. She found herself looking for the reward of that positive feedback, chasing it again and again. Others, like a 31-year-old American working in healthcare, had to eventually accept that work was more palatable when it was considered a part of his life rather than the end-all, be-all.

“I’d rather love my life than love my job,” he said. “I think if I were lying on my deathbed, I could make peace with not having an illustrious career to look back on, but I don’t think I could make peace with having been a bad friend or a bad partner or a bad family member or a bad citizen of this country or world.”

And yet, he went on to note, our career offers us an objective marker of our success in a way that our human relationships simply cannot. “Everyone wants to live a different life,” he told me.

Conversely, I understood this. My work has always felt like something I could control—I would always, to some degree, get back what I put into it. I strove for a type of clinical objectivity in my work life because it was something I never succeeded at having in my personal life, which always felt bogged down with heaviness and drama, miscommunication and insecurity. My life was like a Sally Rooney novel, and I wanted so badly to be Joan Didion or Rachel Cusk, sharp-edged women who intellectualized so much that they seemed to escape the sheer pain of living.¹

“Throughout my adult life, I have used the need to earn money as the central support of a sense of self-justification: as a woman, that always seemed at least preferable to the alternatives,” Cusk writes in Coventry, an essay on the various personal narratives that hold us together and keep us apart. “The need still remains, of course, but increasingly I find it less of a spur.”

My dear friend who often reads my unpublished writing tells me I have a tendency to want to wrap things up in a pat way, to unpack a relatively complex problem and put a bow on it: It’s solved. Yet when it comes to our ever-shifting relationship with work and what the right amount of love might even be, I feel that I am still squarely in the middle of this dilemma. I imagine that the equation will fluctuate within my own life, as my own circumstances change. But would it be so wrong if my work were ultimately my reason for being, the thing that gave me meaning?

When I try to articulate this to others, I often find myself coming back to the difference between Career and Work. As I get older, I am less and less interested in the former, climbing a ladder for an imagined rapt audience, proving myself to a general public through my accomplishments. Following a set of steps that are externally recognizable and impressive have, I fear, begun to lose their glossy hue.

And yet I also know that there is a distinct joy in the way I feel when a sentence comes together, when a piece that has bubbled around in my mind finally makes its way onto the page, when I look at the clock and hours have passed and I’ve been immersed in my own writing, when I reread a phrase and think, I expressed myself in exactly the way I wanted. That has always made a kind of existential sense to me in a way nothing else ever really has.

1. I promised myself I wouldn’t do a footnote, but I do have one caveat here: this is quite clearly not factually true. Just read either The Year of Magical Thinking or Blue Nights, and it’s clear Didion has suffered. (And really, read any Rachel Cusk.) It’s just to say that there is a purity to the way they render their suffering that not all of us can manage.