On enjoying my work
So over on Aura's blog, an anonymous asker asks:
Hello! A Youtube video essayist I follow on Bluesky (Big Joel if you know of him) posted this:
“How do you become a person who just really likes doing work? I thought having a very interesting job would do it but this has not paid off as you might expect”
The first two people I thought of who give me the impression they enjoy their jobs are you and Bruno Dias, so I was wondering if you had an answer for this (because I sure don’t!)
I was slightly taken aback by this, as one often is when one sees one's name in print unexpectedly, and I had to pick apart a little this idea that I give the impression that I enjoy my job.
I certainly have talked very positively about my work in public; I believe most readers should be familiar with the old (but accurate) saw about writers: "I hate writing, but I love having written."1 When you see me talking about my work I am often talking in retrospect about something that I'm proud of, but don't mistake that for a statement about what it was like to make.
I definitely don't want to give the undue impression that the day to day experience of my job is uniformly or consistently joyful. Even in the best of circumstances, any kind of creative work is halting, frustrating, full of false starts and dead ends; doing it under the pressure of deadlines and commercial demands and a team that relies on you is universally and necessarily stressful.
I am very fortunate to work with a team of people who are consistently thoughtful, well-intentioned, and pulling in the same direction; but that doesn't mean that my job is completely free of conflict or disappointment, either.
Besides the inherent challenges of creative work and intra-team dynamics, my job entails quite a few external stressors. I deal with problematic launches, events that don't go as planned, or negative player reactions to things that we do.
I read, if not all, a lot of player feedback; this is something that I actively seek out, but it's also something that's virtually impossible not to seek out. And the truth is that negative feedback, especially in volume, can be difficult to read; I consider myself someone who is fairly capable of detaching my own self-worth and emotional responses from the reactions to my work. But nobody can do that 100%, especially not when it comes to the writing that we do. I don't know how much this comes across to people, but a lot of the writing that goes into Fallen London is very personal to us.
None of this is intended as some woe-is-me, my-life-is-so-hard soulscream, to be clear. On a planetary scale I am grotesquely privileged, and it is true that my job is often fun or pleasant. But on most days it's just, you know, a job.
What I do mean to point out, though, is that the nature of any job, the nature of labor, is that some days you are going to come in and the job is going to be a net negative in your life. The only thing that could eliminate that would be to remove the obligation; which is to say, to make it not a job.
I am not someone who is generationally wealthy or who has had the kind of large studio-acquisition windfalls that some people in the industry have had; I could not stop working tomorrow and be okay for more than a few months. And the truth is that even the very most pleasant ways of making rent are still just that: making rent. And I just fundamentally do not believe that making rent is what we were put on this earth to do.
Often attributed to Dorothy Parker, but there's no evidence she ever said it, and the sentiment has been floating around with writers at least since the early 1900s; it is probably as old as the concept of writing for money.↩