Blogging about mental health
April 30, 2020Here is a small contribution from yours truly, posted this morning to the Dynamic Ecology blog run by my friend Jeremy Fox:
What if my hobby — what I do for “fun” — is being a workaholic?
My Track Record
Explorations of life's curves and straightaways.
My Track Record 
Greg,
Maybe I am missing something but I don’t see the problem, unless your family is objecting to you spending time with your teaching and writing projects. Then, you need to recalibrate a bit. But if it’s just a vague notion, an internal voice telling you that you should be spending more time in other pursuits, then I think you are overly concerned with the “imbalance” in your life.
Both my parents were in the arts and their “work” was their passion and always took priority over everything else. Far from resenting them, I admired this trait. They never attended a single athletic event I competed in and I did not ever feel slighted. Would have been embarrassed in fact had they showed up at a game.
So keep doing what you are doing, is my advice. You are setting a good role model for your kids that the best thing in life is to find a passion and pursue it. As Matt Damon says as Carroll Shelby in Ford vs. Ferrari, “find something you love to do as a job, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”
Henry
Henry, perhaps the fact that I never answered this until now is evidence of a problem? 🙂 Working lots of hours is not necessarily bad in and of itself; however, in my case, working lots of hours continues to mean fewer hours for exercise, family, friends, and SLEEP. There is also a control issue, i.e., I often feel compelled to keep improving my lectures etc. until I collapse in exhaustion, rather than being able to declare something “good enough for now.” I do not feel great about my behavior, nor does my wife.
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