Last week we sat inside the slower look. If you took it, even briefly, even reluctantly, this letter is for you.
Here is what I have noticed, in my own slower-looking and in the conversations I have had with the people I am closest to: when you actually take it, the slower look lands first on work. Not exclusively on work — the friendship comes too, the grief, the body, the tiredness from the last two years. But work is usually first in line. Work is, in fact, where the slower look has been waiting the longest, because work is where you have spent the most hours and looked the least directly.
This is the part of wellness writing that does not get said cleanly enough, in my view. Most wellness writing treats work as the thing the rest of your life has to recover from. The wellness is the weekend. The wellness is the morning before the workday. The wellness is the moment of stillness inside the otherwise compromised week. The implicit message is that wellness lives in the spaces work has not yet claimed, and that the strategy for a well life is to defend those spaces against work as it expands.
I have not found this to be true. I have found that the people I know who are well in any sustainable way have made peace with work being part of their wellness, not the opposition to it. They are not at war with their occupational dimension. They are not protecting the rest of their life from it. They are, instead, in some kind of honest relationship with it.
The honest relationship is the part the slower look begins to make possible. Most of us have been in a managed relationship with work — keeping it at a certain distance, surviving it, getting through it, treating it as the thing that pays for the parts of life that matter more. The managed relationship is exhausting because it is a relationship of permanent quiet conflict, even when neither party is saying so.
The slower look on the occupational dimension is, mostly, the noticing of the conflict. The conflict was always there. The slower look just makes it audible.
From the inside of an honest relationship with work, a few things become possible that were not possible inside the managed one.
You can notice which parts of your work actually feed you. Almost everyone has some, even in jobs they describe as draining. The parts may be smaller than you would prefer. They may be inconveniently located in projects you do not otherwise love. But they exist, and they have been doing quiet work for you for years, and noticing them gives you something to protect.
You can notice which parts of your work are extracting from you in ways the rest of your life is paying for. Not which parts are hard — hard is fine, hard is often the work itself. Which parts are draining without producing anything you value. Which meetings exist for reasons unrelated to your contribution. Which obligations have accumulated through inertia rather than design. Which relationships at work have started to cost more than they return.
You can notice whether the position you are in is structurally able to feed the rest of your life, or whether it is structurally designed to extract from it. This is the most uncomfortable question and the one most people refuse to ask, because the answer sometimes implies a decision they are not ready for. The slower look does not require you to make the decision. It only requires you to know the answer.
I am not asking you to do anything about any of this. The slower look does not commit you to acting. The same principle from last week applies: looking and acting are separate motions, and most of what makes the looking impossible is the unspoken belief that to look is to commit. It is not. You can let the occupational dimension be seen on purpose, for an hour, and then put it down again.
The wellness most of us are looking for is not located in the absence of work. It is located in a different kind of relationship with the dimension of life that work occupies. The slower look is what makes that relationship eventually possible.
More next week. Walk gently.
— The PLM Letter