I keep coming back to a question I don’t have a good answer to.
At the end of my life, when I look back at the years I spent working, will I think it was worth it?
Not the financial kind of worth. I’m not asking whether I made enough money. I’m asking whether the trade I made (hours, attention, energy, the best parts of my mind) produced a life I actually wanted. Whether the years bought something I’d want to keep, or whether I just spent them.
It’s a strange question to sit with because most of the advice I’ve ever received about my career has assumed the question is already answered. Get the better title. Get the bigger team. Get the higher salary. Get the equity. Optimize for optionality. Build the resume. The advice assumes work is the point. The only question is how to do it more efficiently.
But that’s a worldview, not a fact. You can have deep technical skills and not believe work is the point of life. You can be ambitious and reject what ambition usually looks like. You can be a senior engineer with twenty years of experience and decide that the next twenty are not going to be more of the same.
That’s the audience I’m writing for.
What work is for vs what we made it for
Work is supposed to provide for life. That’s the deal. You exchange time and skill for the resources you need to live, and the rest of your life happens with the time you have left.
Somewhere along the way, in the world I work in at least, that deal got inverted. Now life is what happens around work. Your identity is your job title. Your social status is tied to your employer. Your sense of purpose comes from quarterly goals. Your friendships are mostly with colleagues. Your weekends recover you for Monday. Your vacations are when you stop checking Slack.
I’ve been on both ends of this. I’ve had jobs that I wore as identity. I’ve felt the strange validation of saying “I work at Postman” or “I created AsyncAPI” and watching people’s posture change.
And the worst part isn’t even those phrasings. It’s the ones we use without thinking. “I am Director of Engineering at.” “I am the creator of.” Not “I work at,” not “I created something.” We say I am, as if the role is the person. The grammar gives us away. Most people in tech, when asked who they are, will answer with a job title. We’ve collapsed the distinction between what we do and what we are, and the language is where you can see it most clearly.
Now I don’t have those shortcuts.
I’m at the best point in my life by every metric that actually matters to me. I work about four hours a day. Some weekdays I don’t work at all. Others I work a lot, when something needs my attention. The order is: my life first, then the work I want to do. I have financial stability and I use it to build things that mean something to me. I train every day. I cook real food. I spend enjoy time with my friends. I sleep when I’m tired. I have time for myself and my family.
And in Badajoz, people think I’m lazy.
Spaniards say it to your face. The conversational pattern is unmistakable. “What do you do?” “I’m building a thing.” “Do you make money with it?” “Not yet but I expect it to work.” A pause. Then, sometimes, the joke. “Ah, so you don’t really work.” Said with a smile, but they mean it. And the funny part is that I’m doing more meaningful work, on more interesting problems, with more discipline than I ever did when I had a title that impressed them.
Meanwhile, the same people will say of someone working twelve hours a day, “he works a lot,” in a tone that contains pride. As if it’s an achievement. As if running yourself into the ground is the same as building something. We’ve decided that exhaustion is virtue, that long hours are a sign of seriousness, that putting your life second is what mature adults do.
“Hustle is also a form of poverty” — illustration by Alba Lez.
This is hustle culture in its purest form. Not the LinkedIn slogans about waking up at 4 a.m. The deeper thing: a culture where working a lot is the thing you brag about, where working less is the thing you have to defend, and where building a life that doesn’t revolve around work makes other people uncomfortable.
Working twelve hours a day shouldn’t be admired. Neither should eight. Our ancestors fought for the eight-hour day and that was progress, but it wasn’t the destination. Eight hours a day, five days a week, for forty or fifty years of your life, is a lot. It is a lot. We’ve just stopped noticing because everyone around us is doing it. If you can avoid it and you don’t, that should be the thing people raise their eyebrows at. Not the other way around.
May 1st is workers’ day. Today, in much of the world, people stop work to remember why working conditions are what they are. That the protections they have were fought for, that the standards they take for granted were not given. It’s a useful day to ask whether the deal we currently have is the deal we want.
The work that doesn’t show up in any spreadsheet
There’s another part of this that doesn’t get said enough.
The labor movement that gave us May 1st mostly fought for paid work. The eight-hour day, the weekend, the minimum wage, all of that. But the deepest distortion in how we think about work isn’t about the paid kind. It’s about what we count as work in the first place.
Most care work in the world is unpaid, and most of it is done by women. Raising children. Looking after aging parents. Keeping a household running. Maintaining the relationships and emotional infrastructure that hold families and communities together. Hours of labor every day, every week, for years. None of it shows up in GDP. None of it gets a title. None of it builds optionality or vests equity. And yet the entire economy of paid work depends on it being done.
When we talk about hustle culture, we usually mean someone working too many billable hours. That’s part of it. But the larger distortion is that we’ve decided some kinds of effort count and others don’t, and the kinds that count are the ones that produce profit for someone other than the worker.
I’m not arguing for anything radical here. I’m just noting it. If you find yourself ranking your week by how productive it was, ask yourself what counted as productive. If you find yourself feeling guilty for time that wasn’t billable, ask yourself who profits from you feeling that way.
What I’m trying to do
I worked at Postman as Director of Engineering. I created AsyncAPI, which got adopted by... well, all the big names, and ended up under the Linux Foundation and becoming an industry standard. By the metrics that matter in tech, I was doing fine. By the metrics that matter in tech, I should still be doing that.
I left because I noticed I was doing it for reasons that had stopped making sense to me. The work was good. The people were good. But the structure of my life had quietly arranged itself around the job. I couldn’t tell anymore whether I was working because the work was meaningful or because the work was what I did.
Now I’m building Commune. Solo. Bootstrapped. From Badajoz, with my family, with the kind of pace that lets me train every day and cook real food and notice when I’m tired. The product is the part I talk about publicly. The structure is the thing I’m actually defending.
I don’t have a clean answer about whether this is going to work as a business. The honest version is that it might not. I have runway, I have conviction, I have a real product getting better every week, and I still don’t know. What I do know is that the alternative —going back to a job that pays well and slowly takes my life back over— would answer the question for me in a way I don’t want it answered.
I want to look back at this period and recognize myself in it. That’s the test.
The question I want to leave you with
Most people can’t quit their jobs, and shouldn’t have to. The question isn’t whether you build a one-person company in Badajoz. The question is much smaller and much harder.
Are you sure the deal you’ve made is the deal you want?
Not the salary. The deeper one. The one where work gets the best hours of your day, the best years of your life, the cleanest version of your attention. The one where everything else fits around the edges. The one where you tell yourself you’ll have time for the other stuff later.
Later is a place that doesn’t exist for most people. They retire and discover that the muscles for life-without-work atrophied somewhere around year ten. They keep checking email. They don’t know what to do on a Tuesday afternoon. The work that defined them stops, and what’s left is smaller than they thought it would be.
I’m not above this. I could end up there. I’m trying not to, deliberately, with effort, every week. The Weekly Shift exists for people who are trying the same thing.
If that’s you, you’re not alone. We’re not very many but we’re here. We’re building things on our own terms, training when we should be training, eating when we should be eating, sleeping when we should be sleeping, and asking the question over and over: is this the deal I want?
