The Hours That Don't Pay: At least, not Financially

Less than two weeks to go… and I’ll be in my new home. While I wait for my things to arrive, I’ve spent some days whiling away the hours and others trying to achieve something with them. Sickness, cramps, and other ailments have conveniently positioned themselves at various points along the way, providing me with a perfectly legitimate reason not to feel bad about not having enough to do. And that's what started to make me wonder:

What is enough?

Because “doing enough” has quietly become tangled up with "earning enough". I make small lists for myself. Nothing particularly ambitious. Exercise. Write. Eat well. Do something useful. Maybe create a lesson plan. Maybe work on something that could eventually become something else. Some days I do all of it. Some days I do nothing.

And there is often this persistent little voice asking: But what did you actually achieve?

It is a strange question when you think about it. Why does a day need an achievement

And when did earning money become our most reliable evidence that we're doing enough?

And the particularly clever thing about capitalism is that it doesn't only need us to work. It needs us to keep feeling like we should be doing more. Enough is never particularly interesting to an economy built around more.

More money. More productivity. More growth. More consumption. More achievement. We have somehow managed to turn being alive into a performance review.

.

Money buys food and houses and healthcare and freedom and, increasingly, the privilege of not having to worry about money. There are very real reasons to want to earn more.

But somewhere along the way, earning a living and proving that your life is worthwhile seem to have become dangerously close to the same thing.

I can intellectually understand that my worth isn't determined by my income. Unfortunately, my nervous system appears not to have received the memo. Hence, a perfectly pleasant day spent exercising, writing, eating well, thinking, talking to people or simply existing sometimes comes with the faint suspicion that I should have done something more? I thought it was guilt, but am realising it's all conditioning!

What if enough is taking care of your body. Writing something because you had something to say. Making something because you wanted to. Learning something that may never make you money. Being good to people. Resting because you're tired. Trying, in whatever small ways you can, to become a version of yourself that you actually like living with. Can that ever be enough?

Perhaps that's the question I'm trying to change. Not How much did I do? But what do I actually need? And I'm hoping the answer does not come with a nice big price tag.