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Sep. 10th, 2005 04:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tylikThis most recently came to mind from a post of ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
runnerwolf's, but I was thinking similar questions about a post of vixyish's a bit ago, not to mention any number of others.
What is work? What is play? What is rest? How do you know the difference?
and then the kicker
What would you do if you did not need to work for your living?
First off, a disclaimer. While I am semi-retired, I am not independantly wealthy, I am at best independantly frugal. But this whole experience means that I do have a fair bit of choice of what I want to do with the rest of my life. (More than most people, though I wonder sometimes how much more -- having and not having choices is often a pretty subjective experience, from what I can tell.)
Oddly enough, if anything I'm busier now than when I was a Microserf. And I was pretty busy then. But while it seemed like needing some down time to recover from my work then was important, now it doesn't really make sense. Everything in my life that I'm doing right now, pretty much, is something that I've chosen, and something that I love. It's hard for me to point at certain things and say "that's work, while that's play". And many of the things other people call work, I enjoy -- I like weeding the garden. I like cleaning the kitchen. I really enjoy that feeling I get when I tackle a pile of clutter that's been ignored for a while and get everything put away. (However, I don't like feeling taken advantage of, and I don't like feeling like my work is devalued.)
I hear a lot from people about needing to have down time, and rest, and that does make sense to me, but a lot of my down time and rest is also multi purpose -- it's stretching, it's studying, it's cleaning, it's baking. It's having a nice long uninterrupted session in the lab when I have something solid to work on. And sometimes it's escapist fiction, or bumming around the net. Of course, y'all know that I'm a freak.
runnerwolf's, but I was thinking similar questions about a post of vixyish's a bit ago, not to mention any number of others.What is work? What is play? What is rest? How do you know the difference?
and then the kicker
What would you do if you did not need to work for your living?
First off, a disclaimer. While I am semi-retired, I am not independantly wealthy, I am at best independantly frugal. But this whole experience means that I do have a fair bit of choice of what I want to do with the rest of my life. (More than most people, though I wonder sometimes how much more -- having and not having choices is often a pretty subjective experience, from what I can tell.)
Oddly enough, if anything I'm busier now than when I was a Microserf. And I was pretty busy then. But while it seemed like needing some down time to recover from my work then was important, now it doesn't really make sense. Everything in my life that I'm doing right now, pretty much, is something that I've chosen, and something that I love. It's hard for me to point at certain things and say "that's work, while that's play". And many of the things other people call work, I enjoy -- I like weeding the garden. I like cleaning the kitchen. I really enjoy that feeling I get when I tackle a pile of clutter that's been ignored for a while and get everything put away. (However, I don't like feeling taken advantage of, and I don't like feeling like my work is devalued.)
I hear a lot from people about needing to have down time, and rest, and that does make sense to me, but a lot of my down time and rest is also multi purpose -- it's stretching, it's studying, it's cleaning, it's baking. It's having a nice long uninterrupted session in the lab when I have something solid to work on. And sometimes it's escapist fiction, or bumming around the net. Of course, y'all know that I'm a freak.
