How to Never Work Again

People love to say once you find a job you’ll love, you’ll never have to work again.

They, of course, don’t mean you’ll actually never have to work again. They just mean you’ll enjoy it so much that it will, intrinsically, never feel like work. But this phraseology is pretty odd. It seems to characterize the drawbacks of work as being related to what you’re doing, not how you do it. I adore reading. If you rid me of all my responsibilities, I could read for a whole day. Heck, I probably could do that on a weekend right now. But if you now told me to wake up at 6:45 in the morning, everyday, commute to an office and sit down at a desk to read under a dimly lit light-bulb - well, I’d call you crazy.

The core issue with this phrase is its extension: that it’s ever possible to find something that is your life’s work. A phrase that can best be summarized as the following: work so meaningful or purposeful, that the work itself becomes your life, as opposed to what it provides.

You’ll notice that in this definition there is an adverb of degree [1]. The word “so” to add emphasis. I do this to suggest that such a definition should be used rather sparingly. Because it is incredibly significant. Imagine pursuing something so meaningful that you’d do it, even in spite of a lower paycheck, terrible work-life balance or stress. Seemingly, though, the phrase is used rather haphazardly. People seem to think that if you haven’t found your life’s work, that you’ll never be able to enjoy work. Or worse, that finding your life’s work will be obvious, so if it’s not your current job - it’s time to pack your things and leave.

Implicit in both misconceptions is the same flawed premise: that your life’s work, once found, announces itself. That you’ll just wake up some odd Tuesday, and simply recognize it when it arrives. This is of course not the case, since it assumes that meaning just wills itself into existence one day. Of course this is not the case, as the following few paragraphs will display.

By the early 1700’s, the problem of longitude had become one of the most urgent unsolved questions in the Western world. Sailors had long known how to determine the latitude (how far north or south they were) by measuring the angle of the sun or known stars above the horizon. This was a method that had existed, in some form [2], since antiquity. Longitude (how far east or west you were) was an entirely different, and more complex problem. Centuries of the smartest people in Europe had failed to solve it. You can imagine why this would be a bit of an issue. Ships routinely missed their destinations by hundreds of miles. Naval disasters were commonplace. In 1707 [3], a British fleet returning from Gibraltar wrecked off the rocks of the Isles of Scilly because the navigators had no reliable way, at all, of knowing how far west they’d actually travelled. Nearly 1,400 sailors died in a single night - simply because, somewhat ridiculously, no one could answer the question: where are we?

In response, the British Parliament passed the Longitude Act of 1714, establishing a prize of twenty thousand pounds (> $10 Million today) for anyone who could devise a method accurate enough to determine longitude within half a degree on a six week voyage to the West Indies. The scientific consensus of the time was near unanimous: the answer would be astronomical. You’d calculate the longitude using the position of the moon relative to the stars, a method that would require precise charts, complex tables, and a level of mathematical sophistication few at the time had. Few, I say, since after all - this was the age of Newton. Who himself sat on the Board of Longitude [4] established to judge submissions and who believed firmly that the lunar-distance method was the only plausible route to a solution.

Into this story arrives John Harrison, a clockmaker from rural Yorkshire. John has no university education, no formal scientific training and no academic standing. He had a different theory entirely. If you could build a clock precise enough to keep accurate time across a months-long sea voyage, through humidity, temperature swings, the constant rocking of a ship - then you could just compare the time on your clock (still set to your home port) with a local time determined by the sun [5]. The difference between the two would give you your longitude. This method was deceivingly simple, and almost too good to be true. It requires no stars, no tables, and no fancy calculations. Just a clock that didn’t lose or gain more than a few seconds across thousands of miles of open ocean. Hopefully you pick up on the absurdity of the last sentence, since at that time nothing like this was even close to existing. Experts thought it essentially impossible to build.

Harrison spent the next 40+ years of his life trying to build it anyway. His first attempt, completed in 1735, was a wood and brass machine the size of a large nightstand. Ungainly and strange, but it worked well enough in early trials to earn him modest funding to continue. He kept refining it. Each new version was smaller, more precise, and represented years of obsessive, solitary mechanical problem solving. All this, on top of the fact that it was conducted in a workshop, largely alone. The board of Longitude, dominated by astronomers who had all professional incentive to see the lunar distance method win - dragged out their evaluations for decades. They changed the rules on him repeatedly and demanded additional trials. They were not at all subtle about their skepticism that a craftsperson, rather than a scientist, solved their problem.

The fourth attempt by Harrison, was completed in 1759. It was an oversized pocket watch called the H4. It was tested on a voyage to Jamaica and back. Over the course of 81 days at sea, it lost roughly 5 seconds. A figure so staggeringly accurate that it’s almost hard to believe. By any honest reading of the 1714 act, it was clear Harrison had won. The board disagreed, awarding him only partial payment. They demanded he build a working replica, as to prove the original was not a fluke. He was in his sixties at this point. Unsurprisingly, he built the replica, and even more unsurprisingly - the board still did not pay him out. It took a direct intervention from King George III (who reportedly examined Harrison’s work himself and was furious) [6] before Parliament finally authorized something approaching the full prize. Harrison received the prize in 1773 at the age of 80. He died three years later.

Forty years cannot be interpreted as a moment. There was no single morning where Harrison woke up and simply knew that clocks were his thing. There was a problem, paired with decades of being told by people with substantially more authority that he was wrong - regardless of what his clocks demonstrated. Whatever clarity eventually arrived, if it arrived at all in the way the phrase implies, came so late in his life that it’s difficult to classify it as a discovery in any meaningful sense.

The lesson here comes from reframing what exactly we mean by work. If you view work as a means to finding your life’s work - you will be left sorely disappointed. As we’ve seen, you will never really know what your life’s work is. At best, you will simply have to settle for whatever your current job is (that you’ve held for a long amount of time) to be that answer. At the core, this is primarily a labelling issue. When we talk about marathons, you never hear someone say they are running a 1/8th marathon, or a 1/16th marathon. That would be ridiculous. But you do hear people say half, or just a full marathon. What ends up getting called your life’s work is usually just the name given to the accumulated distance of your working career, where enough of it has passed for it to seem like you got by with some intention and not just by sheer luck. And if you leave this whole phrase of your life’s work at that, just a raw description of what you’ve dedicated a lot of time to, it would certainly be possible to not have to work again.

The thing about descriptions is that you obviously cannot find them. You will not get assigned the title of half marathon runner if you didn’t run a half marathon. So the addition of this phrase to your life finds you in the rearview. This renders the project of locating your life’s work as mostly useless. All the searching, the quitting, the reframing is not really going to change the amount of time needed for the descriptor to work. The only way to have something worth describing is to keep going long enough that there’s something to describe.

It may seem like the advice I’m prescribing is to just put up with the job you hate. And while on paper that’s what the advice may suggest, there are obvious ways around this. You can strive to want more in your career, to want more financial freedom, to want more life flexibility - without any of these things being tied to the fulfillment you derive from your job. The fault would be to assume your job can carry the weight of things far beyond it. These abstract life principles, should you choose to desire them, are rarely sourced from your 9 to 5.

Many people do end up loving what they do. If you investigate into many of these people, it almost never started with a search for what gives them meaning. It started, instead, with doing something consistently and seriously for a long enough time that it became theirs. The love of such a thing came later, if it came at all. This means the advice was never really “find your passion” and instead was something like “just pick something”.

In the strictest sense, yes - you’ll have to work. But if you stop waiting for the moment it stops feeling like work, and stop treating that moment as the threshold between a life half-lived and a life fully arrived, you may fare much better. If you let the distance accumulate, the work starts to feel less like a thing being done to you and more like a thing you’re doing.

This has nothing to do with your job changing, and has everything to do with you having stopped asking work to be something it isn’t.

Notes