What consuming yourself looks like when you love it

Creative clarity and introspection

I used to watch people talk about their jobs and think: they have no idea.

The way they’d light up describing a project. Check their phone at dinner. Drift mid-conversation back to some problem they were turning over. I’d think - when they eventually come up for air, they’re going to be shocked by how far under they went.

I thought I knew better. I’d learned that lesson. I had the scars to prove it.

I was wrong.

Two months into a new role, and it is consuming me.

Not in a way I can easily explain or justify. I think about work on Saturday mornings. I wake up and reach for my phone before I’ve registered being awake. I lie in the dark and run through conversations, details, decisions I haven’t made yet.

And the strange part? It doesn’t feel bad.

There’s a particular kind of tiredness that comes at the end of a day when you’ve actually cared about what you were doing. It sits differently. The sense of purpose is strong, almost intoxicating. And I’ve started to notice myself protecting it, this feeling, the way you would something fragile.

Which is exactly when I started paying attention.

Because here’s the thing nobody tells you about loving your work: the warning signs look identical to the good signs.

Thinking about a design detail on a Sunday morning. Is that passion, or an inability to switch off? Waking up already composing an email. Is that drive, or dependency? Feeling unsettled on a slow day. Is that ambition, or is that something more uncomfortable?

I genuinely don’t know. Two months isn’t long enough to know.

The Art of Digital Breathing, exhibited at Copenhagen Contemporary.

What I’ve stopped believing is that consumption is always the problem. I used to assume the people I was watching from the outside were burnt out and too far in to see it. Now I think some of them felt exactly what I’m feeling. That pull back to the work not out of obligation, but because they actually couldn’t wait to see what came next.

Maybe that’s fine. Maybe that’s even good.

But I keep returning to a question I can’t quite put down.

We become what we spend our hours on. That much feels true. So the question isn’t really whether your work consumes you. Most things worth doing will, at some point. The question is whether it’s consuming you in a direction you’d actually choose, with eyes open.

Right now, I think mine is.

I’m just making sure I keep my eyes open.