Read this essay last night before bed and it got me thinking. Most of the novels I’ve read lately don’t speak to the experience of work; it’s peripheral, something that happens in a paragraph at the beginning of the chapter, something that barely frames the terms of each character’s existence. Schuessler cites a novelist who claims that “work has become central to many people’s self conception.” I think this is nonsense. For most Americans work has become a place to earn a check while you keep your soul safely protected far from the degrading, crushing stupidity of all too many jobs.

Yet work is central to who we are in our house. The decisions we’ve made about where to work or what to do with the time when we’re not together as a family…we’ve tried to be doing something meaningful, some set of tasks that actually matters. Yeah, teaching and social work, it’s often deck chairs on the Titanic, but the struggle is important, and there are successes along the way. Work shouldn’t be something where you forget who you are for seven or eight hours a day. I know there’s a counterargument here — such work is a luxury of the upper middle-class — but it’s not impossible to carve out a decent life without immense amounts of disposable income, so the choice to do what’s right (as opposed to what’s easy, thanks Albus) isn’t as inconceivable as some would believe.