Living in the Wrong Direction: Livelihood vs Life

Over the summer, I read The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Your Life from Work by Simone Stolzoff, a well-written book that shares compelling stories about people who redefined their paths when life shifted or their priorities changed. However, one minor idea towards the end of the book reshaped my perspective: your livelihood is not your life.

I’ve spent decades pivoting between various careers, yet I often find myself circling back to education. It’s where I’m employed today, though I still ponder what I want to do “when I grow up.” Recently, I came across an article about an 88-year-old grandmother who asks herself the same question, and I wondered if I would also be pondering this question in my next decades?

Universal questions seem to be on my mind lately, including the infamous, “What do you do for a living?” It remains the default American icebreaker, whether at a cocktail party or a backyard barbecue. What I’m doing right now is a livelihood. Don’t get me wrong—I love my students. But work is still work. It isn’t always pleasant, and it isn’t always fueled by passion. If you weren’t being paid, would you keep doing your job? For most of us, the answer is no. What if we shifted the question? Instead of asking what we do for a living, what if we asked: What do you do to love your life?

Because ultimately, isn’t the heart of life, the good stuff, found at the fringes of your day, the moments when you’re living what you love? Time spent with loved ones. Hours engaged in a favorite hobby. Being fully in the world around you. Work often consumes 40 hours (or more) a week, but beyond that, there are 128 more. Even after eight hours of sleep a night, you still have about 72 fringe hours—where life is truly lived.

As Stolzoff points out, when you tune into those *fringe hours, you begin to define who you are. While defining oneself by one's work can be dangerous. For years, when I worked in sales, I felt compelled to explain how I moved from teaching into sales and marketing—as though teaching had to remain my anchor identity. But really, I was so much more than a teacher, but because I had defined myself as a teacher, I felt lost when I was no longer living that reality. I wasn’t lost; there were so many parts of me that still remained.

Really, I had lived my best life on the fringes outside my occupation as a wife, mom, daughter, sister, friend, writer, bread maker, runner, nature preserver, house restorer, painter, storyteller, book reader, historical home enthusiast, and traveler. The pieces and parts of my life (and me) are so numerous (they are for you, too). Teaching was and is really a small slice of the pie, an occupation to collect my livelihood to allow me to live the meatier parts of my life.

In Stolzoff’s book, he argues that a shift occurred during the 1970s with the release of publications like What Color Is Your Parachute? surmising that life’s purpose was arrived at through meaningful work. Work had primarily been a means of survival throughout most of human history, and in modern history, it became a purpose. Before, Christian influences associated work with the sacred and God’s favor. Secular thought reframed it as a measure of moral goodness, and later, during the Industrial Revolution, as work branched into professions, it became tied to personal identity.

Even during these shifts, work remained first and foremost a livelihood, though it also began to carry some weight as a status symbol—a way to impress and gain standing within one’s social network. Over time, these trends converged, shaping the idea that work is not only central but perhaps the central purpose of life, as it did in the 1970s, devaluing all other parts of our lives and ourselves, and casting work as the singular expression of personal identity, where every introduction begins with, What do you do for a living?

As an American, I’ve grown up immersed in narratives of purpose-driven work and hustle culture, messages reinforced by media and society. Hustle culture, the great-grandchild of the Protestant work ethic, surmises that we live to work rather than work to live. This narrative has influenced how I think about and encounter my work, both paid and my side hustles. (Had I been born in Europe, South America, or Asia, would I think differently about work? Would I see it simply as a way to survive? As a means to support life outside of it? Or would I, as I have for much of my life, continue to live to work?)

I also question, how does one live fully well when one must earn a living? Can someone thrive in a livelihood they do not enjoy? My grandparents seemed to. Working diligently in jobs that were far from their dreams, yet they appeared content despite long hours and backbreaking labor. (My grandfather’s job eventually destroyed his health.) Both came of age during the Depression and World War II eras that undoubtedly shaped their perspective on what work meant  and what one could feel grateful for. There was no golden parachute in their future to come to rescue them—there was hard work, family, and faith.

Maybe it is in this easy living, a time of immediacy and continuous dopamine hits, that I, and others, believe we are owed fulfilling jobs aligned with our passions. Work that is so good it doesn’t feel like work at all but is instead a continuous rush. Anyone who has worked for any length of time knows that work always requires work. Work, by definition, is an ”activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result.” Effort is not comfortable. It stretches, stresses, and challenges. These are the same conditions required for growth.

For me, I want to be comfortable, not exert too much energy, be fulfilled creatively, feel like work is purposeful, like everyone I work with, work remotely–but can go into an office only when it suits me, have plenty of paid time off, and make an impressive salary. Writing this out, I can see how ridiculous this list is. There isn’t much growth in that scenario.

The current juxtaposition of grind culture and easy living confuses my mind greatly, and my soul seems never to catch up. Which ideology fulfills the part of us made to work? A book is not a Magic Eight Ball; it cannot give me the answers. The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Your Life from Work left me pondering, as you can see, and made me realize I have to continue to look inside myself to find what is right for me. Right now, I plan to work on gratitude for all that my career gives me and to continue to lean into the fringes of my life where the best parts of life are lived. And, if the time is right, I can pivot, reverse, or go forward to a new type of livelihood. But the most important thing I should ask each morning and each night: Am I living in a way that makes me love my life? ​

*fringe hours is my interpretation of Stolzoff's description of hours outside of paid work