Starting From a WeChat Voice Call
Today I had a WeChat voice call with my mother, and we talked about finding a job.
This kind of conversation is ordinary. I am studying in the United States now, and what my mother worries about most is not some abstract career plan, but living expenses. Rent, food, insurance, and all the costs outside tuition can quickly become very concrete pressure. As the conversation goes on, it naturally lands on the same point: I still need to find a job. There is no grand theory here, just a plain anxiety about life.
Later, I thought about how light the phrase “finding a job” sounds. It sounds like sending resumes, doing interviews, getting hired, and putting life back on track. But what it really points to is something else: giving away my time again, entering the rhythm of an organization again, accepting an external system of evaluation again, and trading the clearest hours of each day for a limited sense of security.
Work is first of all for living expenses. Of course, some people will say work makes people independent, gives people dignity, helps people realize their value, and prevents them from becoming idle in a long life. It sounds right, almost morally radiant. A person who does not work seems to owe something to society, while a hardworking person is assumed to be reliable, mature, and respectable.
But I increasingly feel that this view hides a brutal premise: most people do not work because they love work. They work because they cannot survive without it. My mother worries about my job search not because she necessarily believes in the necessity of work itself, but because she knows that living in a foreign country without enough money for daily expenses can immediately become a real problem.
If a person has to sell the clearest, most complete, most alive hours of the day in exchange for rent, food, medical care, and a little security, I find it hard to see that as a gift. It is more like a curse, a curse made respectable, institutionalized, and morally acceptable.
A friend once told me something absurd. He has not found an internship himself, yet he often has to comfort people who already found very good internships, because they are anxious about return offers.
There is something almost ironic about this. The person who has not “made it ashore” has to comfort those who already have; the person without an internship has to comfort people with good internships. But if you think about it, this is not about who is being dramatic. It is that the order of work never really lets people settle down. Before an internship, people worry about getting in. After an internship, they worry about staying. After a return offer, they worry about the team, performance, layoffs, and whether the next job hop will be better.
Every stage looks like a finish line, but behind every finish line there is immediately another checkpoint. Work does not really bring certainty. It only postpones part of uncertainty, while producing new insecurity at the same time.
In Genesis, the punishment given to human beings is not idleness, but toil:
And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.
– Genesis 3:17-19
In this sense, work was never a badge of honor from the beginning. It was a cost of survival. People do not toil because they are blessed. They toil because after being expelled from Eden, they have to earn bread by the sweat of their face.
Work and Labor Are Not the Same Thing
I am not against labor.
Human beings need labor. Cooking, writing, fixing things, taking care of family, learning a skill, cleaning up a messy room: these things are not shameful. They can even bring a real sense of satisfaction. Labor connects people with the world and lets them see traces left by their own actions.
After coming to the United States, I slowly learned many things I had never done before. I cook for myself, cut my own hair, and repair small things that break in daily life. Sometimes these things are troublesome, and sometimes I do them clumsily, but they do not make me feel deprived. On the contrary, they make me feel that life can be handled, repaired, and created bit by bit by my own hands.
But modern “work” is different.
Work is usually not “what I want to do,” but “what I have to do.” It does not begin from human needs, but from profit, process, KPI, performance, and power structures. In it, a person is not a whole person, but a position, a resource, working hours, cost, output, and risk.
Labor can be active, while work is often forced. Labor can serve life, while work often devours life.
Confusing the two is one of the most common tricks bosses and managers use when they sell people an empty promise.
The Cruelest Part of Work Is That It Takes the Day
Work does not only take time. It takes the best time of the day.
A person’s energy is not evenly distributed. Morning and afternoon clarity are often the best times for thinking, creating, learning, and feeling the world. But for most people, those hours belong to the company. By the time they return home at night, what is left is often a tired body, scattered attention, and a vague emptiness that is hard to name.
I am in the United States now, and in the morning I often play online games with friends in China’s UTC+8 time zone. For me it is morning, but for them it is often already midnight to 3 a.m. They have already worked the whole day, yet after coming home at night they still do not feel satisfied. They keep playing games, as if trying to use the night to make up for the part of the day that work took away. It is not just entertainment. It is a concrete gap in life.
Many people’s lives are not empty of content. They are simply forced to happen after work. When the day is taken by work, the night becomes compensation: a little entertainment, a little relationship, a little learning, a little life that should have happened naturally. But the more the night is used as compensation, the more sleep and spirit are drained.
Work takes away the day first, then asks people to use the night to repair the self damaged by the day.
This is not a blessing. This is depletion.
“Loving Your Work” Is Often a Survivor’s Story
Of course, some people truly love their work.
Some people find creativity, control, and achievement in work. Some people also have enough choices to leave bad environments and find something closer to their interests. Such work exists, and it is worth cherishing.
But that does not prove that work itself is a blessing.
To love one’s work often requires many conditions: a healthy body, a stable family, useful credentials, training, and information channels, decent income, a safe workplace, room for trial and error, and most importantly, choice. Without these conditions, work rarely becomes self-realization. It is more like a transaction for survival.
When a person with choices says, “Work makes me happy,” and a person without choices says, “I have to work,” they are not talking about the same thing.
If we only see the former and ignore the latter, we mistake the luck of a few for the fate of many.
Work Is Made Necessary So People Accept the Unreasonable
The most common defense of work is not that it is sacred, but that there is no other way.
“There is no choice. Everyone has to work.” This sentence sounds realistic and hard to refute. Precisely because it sounds like a plain statement of fact, it becomes easier to accept everything unreasonable that follows: long working hours, unstable employment, blurry responsibilities, overtime that cannot be refused, and systems that squeeze life into the cracks around work.
You cannot even take this little hardship?
Hasn’t everyone gone through this?
Are you being too idealistic?
These questions turn structural pain into personal failure. As if, once you are realistic enough, adaptable enough, and aware enough that “life is just like this,” exhaustion will disappear and deprivation will become natural.
But pain does not always come from mindset. Often, it comes from the fact that work really does occupy too much of life.
When a person has no time to live, no energy to think, no room to love, and no ability to refuse unreasonable arrangements, telling them that “work is necessary” is really asking them to accept their own chains.
What Matters Is Not Not Working, but Not Being Defined by Work
To say work is a curse is not to say people should do nothing.
The real question is not action itself, but whether people have the right to choose how they act. People can create, contribute, learn, take responsibility, and devote themselves to a goal for a long time. But only under relative freedom can these things approach meaning.
If a person is only running desperately so they do not fall, it is hard for them to truly enjoy running.
So I increasingly feel that what matters in life is not finding some so-called perfect job, but reducing work’s control over life as much as possible. Work can be a source of income, a temporary means, or a place to practice certain skills. But it should not become the only way a person understands themselves.
A person should not have to prove their worth only through title, income, performance, company name, or career development.
A person is first a person, and only then an employee.
The real blessing may not be finding a job that never goes wrong, but knowing that with money or without money, people can still find ways to live. Life may become harder, and choices may become fewer, but a person does not lose their entire future just because an offer did not come, an interview failed, or a gap period exists.
Going further, the real blessing is that a person can still turn their attention back to life itself and devote themselves to what they truly care about. Creating something of one’s own, writing an article, building a project, organizing a memory, going somewhere never visited before, genuinely experiencing a meal, a relationship, a trip, or an afternoon of sunlight. These things may not bring stable income, and they may never appear on a resume, but they are closer to evidence that a person has truly lived.
I actually saw this kind of life when I was young. My father fished for a living, and often could not steadily support the family’s expenses. My younger brother and I sometimes ate porridge with soy sauce and dried white radish. That is not a life worth romanticizing, and poverty should not be praised. But we did live through it. Life was narrow and difficult, but it did not stop completely just because there was no respectable guarantee.
Anxiety is good at turning things that have not happened into reality ahead of time. It makes a person feel as if they have already been rejected, already failed, already run out of paths. But reality is often not that absolute. When many things actually happen, people end up solving them while stumbling forward, afraid but still moving.
Give the Day Back to Life
Work is not a blessing, but a curse.
This sounds pessimistic, but it does not have to lead only to despair. On the contrary, only by admitting that work is not naturally noble can we begin to see the value of life itself again.
We can be more honest about exhaustion, more careful with our time, and less willing to judge ourselves and others by career achievement. When possible, we can also fight for more choices: less meaningless consumption, healthier boundaries, real rest, and more daylight not occupied by work.
Those days should be returned to life, to creation, and to experience. They can be used to build one’s own projects, write one’s own articles, create one’s own work, and slowly build a little influence that belongs to oneself. These things may not bring income immediately, and they may never be recognized by any performance review, but at least they grow out of oneself.
Perhaps what is truly worth believing is not that work will save us, but that even when work is temporarily absent, we may not really fall all the way down. There is no need to suffer in advance for things that have not happened yet, because anxiety over the future does not make the future more controllable. It only makes today worse. Prepare when preparation is needed, send resumes when resumes need to be sent, face things when they arrive, but do not move every possible future misfortune into today and carry it now.
If work cannot be completely escaped, at least do not treat it as the only way out of life.
The curse is terrifying not only because it binds people, but because people may gradually forget that they are bound.