Really, thank you. The language here is pretty spot on, I've been looking for this for a long time. "But the notion that the two spheres must be kept apart in

Really, thank you. The language here is pretty spot on, I've been looking for this for a long time. "But the notion that the two spheres must be kept apart in order not to contaminate each other with their separate priorities and aspirations — something Adorno terms a “bi-phasic pattern of life” — is one immensely limiting of our humanity: While the advice may offer advantages in terms of economic rationalization, its intrinsic merits are of a dubious nature. Work completely severed from the element of playfulness becomes drab and monotonous, a tendency which is consummated by the complete quantification of industrial work. Pleasure when equally isolated from the “serious” content of life, becomes silly, meaningless and sheer “entertainment” and ultimately it is a mere means of reproducing one’s working capacity, whereas the real substance of any non-utilitarian activity lies in the way it faces and sublimates reality problems: res severa verum gaudium [true joy is a serious thing]. This, Adorno argues, is one of many maxims inherited from the earlier development of middle-class society, which no longer serve us or apply to the technological and sociological realities of our daily lives, yet ones to which we continue subscribing." "I have always found the notion of compromising — particularly when it comes to this unfair tradeoff of work and life — to be a double-edged sword of meaning: on the one hand, a compromise implies reaching a happy medium between two conflicting needs; on the other, to compromise requires the trimming off of excess in one area in order to alleviate a deficit in the other, which invariably means compromising — in the sense of undermining — the area deemed excessive. And yet, as Anaïs Nin memorably remarked her passionate case for the importance of excess in creative work, such compromising hardly benefits us in the end." "Good work like a good marriage needs a dedication to something larger than our own detailed, everyday needs; good work asks for promises to something intuited or imagined that is larger than our present understanding of it. We may not have an arranged ceremony at the altar to ritualize our dedication to work, but many of us can remember a specific moment when we realized we were made for a certain work, a certain career or a certain future: a moment when we held our hand in a fist and made unspoken vows to what we had just glimpsed."