Good Question

Perhaps not surprisingly, the one question I'm hearing now more than any other is, why are you still working? I have to admit, it's not an unreasonable question. Given the limited time I've got remaining, do I really want to spend it working?

Like most things with me, the answer's somewhat complicated.

As I've written, I've been half-heartedly pursuing long-term disability and an early payout on my life insurance for awhile now, but haven't been able to muster the energy to actually fill it out. The problem, I think, is the unreasonable hope thing again. If I fill out the paperwork, my doctor signs it, and the insurance company pays out a bunch of cash based on the premise that I'm going to fall over dead in six months, that makes it pretty undeniable that I'm going to fall over dead.

As stupid as it sounds, I find there's comfort in the deniability, even if it's not in my long-term interests. I think that's partly why I haven't actually pulled the trigger.

Then there's the deer in the headlights problem. This comes up a lot with cancer (even if you aren't actively dying), and probably health care more generally: the doctor says something like, "surgery is now our only option" or "the scan shows X" or "I'm sorry to tell you that you've got Y," and your brain just shuts down. The doctor's yammering on about the implications of what they've just told you, and you're still back at the start of the conversation processing the unprocessable. It's a problem.

I do think there's been an aspect of that for me for the past few weeks. I knew the scan wasn't going to show an ironic miracle cure, but even expecting bad news, actually getting the bad news has been hard to process. So you don't. You just get up and go to work and wander down the established pathway through your day. Dealing with reality, and actively making choices, requires more than you've got, so you just rely on habit.

And then there's the ironic bit. I've read a fair number of stories about terminal patients who, at the very end of their days, get this sort of miraculous second wind. Grandpa's been semi-conscious for the last six weeks, barely hanging on, and doing nothing but lying in bed, non-responsive, and then suddenly he's sitting up. He's engaging with the people around him, and it seems like a miracle's happened, and then two hours later he's dead. I think I'm having a similar experience at a more macro level.

To be clear, my professional life is basically over, in that it's hard to have a professional life without a biological one. I'm aware of that, and have (mostly) reconciled myself to that fact. And yet. Over the last few weeks, I've found myself wanting to start a ton of new projects at work: building new data visualizations and dashboards that would make things easier for groups to get things done; creating new operational procedures eliminating stupid* work so folks have more time to work on the things that matter; creating training manuals for work that only one person knows how to do; etc., and etc., and etc. There's just so much to do, and while I work with great people who are more than capable of getting these things done without me (even if they may not want to), it's just more fun to be a part of it.

Of course there's also the fact that I am one of those people for whom "work" and "life" aren't really separate concepts. There isn't much of the latter without the former.** As weird as it sounds (even to my ears), to step away from the job is, in some ways, to die.

And I'm not ready for that yet.

And so I continue to get up in the mornings and go to work.

But I can't really deny the fact that the clock is running down for much longer. Everything I've read, seen and heard tells me that the inflection point is going to come out of nowhere. Cancer is not a long, slow decline from active to dead. It's a long, slow decline from active to marginal, and then an  absolute free fall from marginal to dead:

Thus, I can't really afford to wait until I "feel like I'm dying" to do the things I want to do, 'cause by then it'll be too late. In some ways, it may be already. I was looking at the calendar today, making plans for the next legs of the GCW tour, and it became pretty clear that time is running out. Lots I still want to do, but not a ton of time left to do it. 

So, yeah, why am I still working? 


* Examples of stupid work include things like: typing a number that someone else previously typed because the system they typed it into can't talk to the system you need it in -- and then having yet another person who needs that number retype it yet again 'cause your system won't talk to theirs; calling or emailing someone to ask if they're done yet; spending twenty minutes doing the work necessary to document that you did something when actually doing that something only took you five minutes; etc., and etc., and etc.
** Ryan Avent, a writer for the Economist, had some really interesting thoughts on the new ways work and life are connecting. You can find his article here.