I can't remember if it's ever come up how a big newish thing is what smart people expect their jobs to do for them - so much more than pay a living wage. Friends, meaning, status - the last is especially a bitch - all tied up in jobs. It's so fucking dumb.

If you have a marriage where you need your spouse to be your everything, that is a dead marriage walking. It will ruin almost everyone. And yet our culture has largely made it the default belief about career, for a certain breed of well-educated white-collar types. We've made a god of it, built an implicit infrastructure of worship around it. It's hard to think of something more poisonous that people don't taste as poison.

I'm now at the beginning of the fiendishly difficult endeavor of untangling all this. It's so fucking hard in ways I wouldn't have imagined when I was a newb. Maybe bc when you start out you swim up the gradient of more and it's progress you can feel. Once you get enough more that stops working. At least it has in my case.

I've always admired KK bc he seems to have become maximally himself, and with a bit of attention - not too much, it seems like - bent a working life around his own nature, and not the reverse. Not everyone has the privilege of being able to pull that off, but I think many could. Many who are reading this can. It gives me hope.