
How to Care Less About Work
As we peer around the corner of the pandemic, let’s talk about what we want to do—and not do—with the rest of our lives.
We love to talk about kids’ personalities, how unique and weird and joyful they are. We don’t grow out of those characteristics so much as subsume them with duties. But they remain the building blocks of our humanness, the enduring difference between us and robots. We must preserve those inclinations toward delight and whimsy, toward the ineffable and the unimpressive, the feelings you can’t re-create with a machine or optimize for peak productivity. They are worth rediscovering not because they will allow us to rest and, as such, make us better workers—but because they anchor us to who, at heart, we’ve always been.