It depends what you mean by work, doesn't it? I'm quite willing to accept that the value I instinctively place on work and, to a lesser degree, success has a l

It depends what you mean by work, doesn't it? I'm quite willing to accept that the value I instinctively place on work and, to a lesser degree, success has a large societal component. When I try to evaluate myself, I cannot avoid those values, and it doesn't help that my predisposition to anxiety emotionally magnifies any idea of not doing something useful with my life, of wasting time and makes it difficult for me to ever be truly relaxed if I feel like I'm in such a situation. That's been the dominant emotion when I think about my day job since I first started having day jobs some four years ago - anxiety. And it's pretty arbitrary, isn't it? A common justification or explanation of caring about success is that it improves one's chances of being important and remembered. But I am not important; I hope to accomplish something interesting enough in life that people will remember me for time to come, but it's very unlikely to happen, and if I consider that there are ways to optimize for memorability - careers more associated with fame, or writing - that I am not taking advantage of, and that I don't mind that at all, I can see that that has nothing to do with my real emotional goals. I value work not as a means to any end, but because I've internalized it as an end in itself. Even people who spend money to get buildings named after them - are they doing it to be remembered, or just because leaving one's name on things is part of our societal narrative of success, and doing it themselves makes their self-narrative better track that one? But... then there are my side projects. The ones that even if I had the capability to work on full time, I wouldn't, because they don't seem important enough in the long run (there the anxiety creeps up again) - yet that I like no less for it. When I think about doing them as side projects, the associated emotions are pleasure, personal fulfillment, and connection. I value the intellectual stimulation I get out of them; I value being able to prove to myself my ability to complete them (which is a different, more idiosyncratic and egotistical emotion than the desire to matter); I value being able to help people, if the project is used by others, and to socially engage with them. I even value the feeling of being (mentally) exhausted after giving the thing my all, very similar to the feeling of having given a physical activity, say skiing, my all. I think those desires are more intrinsic than the desire to work. Inherently those projects are so similar to work; indeed, I'm lucky enough to be able to perform for my job almost the same activities (reverse engineering, coding) I like to do by myself. But I think they are anti-work, because when I pop a project off the personal stack and onto the work stack, I can't help but think about it very differently. It grows all sorts of context that didn't exist before. But at least it's similar.