Continuing my semi-occasional series of quotes I think about a lot, I realized a while back that work is basically a hobby of mine. I don’t mean the specific work I do for a given company for pay, but the larger themes of the kind of work I do, what’s important to me, what I want to encourage, how to do it better. It’s a cliche that we spend a huge chunk of our lives at work, so to me it makes sense to pay attention to it and not relegate it to “that thing I have to do”. (I recognize that part of this is that I’m incredibly fortunate to have the kind of job that repays this attitude, but — and I’ll write more about this later — we all have more control in our lives than we always realize. So in a lot of ways this is also psychological self-defense.)
This ties into what I said in my first post about helping people find new jobs! During one of my various conversations with friends about the topic, one of them pointed me at this bit, from C. Wright Mills’ “On Intellectual Craftsmanship”, an essay included as an appendix to his The Sociological Imagination (which I still need to get around to reading).
It is best to begin, I think, by reminding you, the beginning student, that the most admirable thinkers within the scholarly community you have chosen to join do not split their work from their lives. They seem to take both too seriously to allow such dissociation, and they want to use each for the enrichment of the other. Of course, such a split is the prevailing convention among men in general, deriving, I suppose, from the hollowness of the work which men in general now do.
