Thoughts on Work vs Life

I am going to take a controversial stand today. I think the advice, “Don't let work become your identity,” is a very reductionist idea. In my opinion, it's a subjective stance, popularised and forced down people's psyches by social media marketing agencies to push people into consumerism. There's a pint of truth and a barrel of lies, at best.

Let's start with, "What is your identity?". We identify in very many different ways in our social lives, our profession, our hobbies, our gender, our sexuality, our opinions, our political leanings, our beliefs, our tenets, socio-cultural markers like religion, race, ethnicity, etc. So, what identity is becomes a very subjective question, which changes with context. In a political debate, your political leaning becomes your identity; in a ritual, your family lineage might take precedence over, say, your profession. The fact that your hobby is “playing guitar” is less relevant to your identity in a civic discourse; it will be your belief system and your opinions on what good governance is.

Thus, we need to first define what identity is in a discourse. One of the reasons why ad-hominem arguments seem to find popularity among general audiences is the lack of a sense of what identity is.

Back to the argument, let me define what identity is in this argument. The answer is undefined. In popular social media circles, the statement “Don't let work become your identity” is often used to ridicule people who are workaholics or have no hobbies. But what exactly are we talking about when we say someone's work has become their identity? Are we saying that they derive their entire self-worth from their job? Are we saying that they don't have friends? That they don't have hobbies? That they don't travel? That they don't go to the gym? Or are we simply saying that they spend a disproportionate amount of their waking hours working? These are very different things.

Someone can work twelve hours a day and still have a rich inner life. Someone can work eight hours a day, travel every weekend, have ten hobbies and still have absolutely no idea who they are without the validation of other people. The problem, therefore, is not necessarily work. The problem is the assumption that there is a universally correct way of distributing your time.

Hobby is an interesting concept these days. It's mostly people going biking, hiking, or playing music to gain social approval, or maybe being called a “stud” in popular Gen Z lingo. Our expectations from a hobby, while on the surface seem to be centred around self-satiation, are often reduced to engines of social acceptance and are a direct outcome of consumerism.

Someone who enjoys wine would rather prefer going to an old bar or brewery than a club with people trying to get some action down their pants. I, in no way see people going to clubs as a bad thing, but the intention must be understood. Buying a bike because you like biking is very different from buying one on an EMI just so you can post reels of yourself enjoying the mountains. It's no longer enjoying the mountains with your eyes and your skin feeling the gale of moving through a valley. Instead, it all becomes a spectacle from an app called “Camera” on your phone, proxied to Instagram, every few hours.

Well, people who do none of the above are called workaholics or people with no hobbies. Funny enough, most people who believe in this notion are often quick enough to label people who like to play or listen to music in their free time as boring, unless they're running a fan-page or putting it put on socials and make a big buzz out of it, remember that person in college who played awful guitar, but had all the mannerisms of a musician ? Yes, that's a popular example of the same. Someone who reads for pleasure is often placed in the same bucket. In the end, all that matters is how tall your pillar of societal approval stands. And it's a measuring contest to hide your insecurities. Being a socialite is often considered more honourable than actually sitting idle and enjoying sweet music.

The irony is that we have taken the concept of a hobby, which was supposed to be an activity done for its own sake, a way to slow down or a healthy distraction and turned it into another form of identity. You don't just cycle anymore. You are a cyclist. You don't just read anymore. You are a reader. You don't just travel anymore. You are a traveller. You don't just drink wine. You are a wine person. And once an activity becomes an identity, it can become another market waiting to sell you things.

But there is another end of the spectrum. Some people do give all their hearts and souls to work, sometimes because it's really all they've got. And I see nothing wrong with that. The above argument often fails to understand the context someone grew up with. It often fails to understand the fact that work, for some people, is their portal to a better life.

There isn't a single psychological profile that produces a workaholic. For some people, work is simply where they found meaning. For others, work is where they found competence. For some, it is economic necessity. For some, it is social mobility. For some, it is an escape from a difficult home environment. For some, it is the only place where their abilities are recognised. And for some, it is genuinely the thing they enjoy doing the most.

There is also a less romantic explanation: work can provide structure. You wake up, you have something to do, there are problems to solve, there are people depending on you, and there is a measurable outcome at the end of the day. For someone who doesn't have a strong social or family structure outside work, the workplace can become the most predictable source of meaning in their life.

And then there is ambition. Imagine someone who grows up without much economic capital. Their family has limited money, limited connections and limited access to the kinds of cultural experiences that wealthier people take for granted. They discover that they are good at something, like, programming, medicine, engineering, finance, law, entrepreneurship, whatever it may be. Suddenly, they discover a mechanism through which their circumstances can change.

Work is no longer just work. It becomes mobility. The person isn't necessarily thinking, “I need to make work my identity.” They are thinking, “If I become really good at this, maybe my life will be different.” That distinction matters.

Telling that person to “work less and find hobbies” can sometimes be equivalent to telling someone to stop climbing the ladder while they're still halfway up it.

This is where another common argument falls apart: “Look at successful people. CEOs, wealthy entrepreneurs, successful executives, oh, they all have hobbies.” Okay. But which successful people are you looking at?

The problem is survivorship bias. Survivorship bias occurs when we look at the people who survived or succeeded through some selection process and ignore the people who didn't make it. Imagine 1,000 people who spend their twenties obsessively working. Some burn out. Some fail. Some change careers. Some stagnate. Some become moderately successful. And a handful become extraordinarily successful.

Now imagine interviewing only those handful of extraordinarily successful people. You discover that they exercise, read books, travel, play golf, spend time with their families and have interesting hobbies. Then you conclude, “See? Successful people have hobbies.” But you don't know whether those hobbies produced their success. You don't know whether they had those hobbies before they became successful. You don't know whether their success gave them the money and autonomy to develop those hobbies. And you certainly don't know what happened to the hundreds of people who worked just as hard and didn't become successful.

The invisible population is the important one. Career advice often suffers from exactly this problem. We listen to people who successfully navigated a system and then mistake their characteristics for the recipe that produced their success. The people who tried the same thing and failed are no longer visible to us. We are looking at the survivors and reverse-engineering their lives into a formula for success.

There is another variable here that gets ignored: time. A wealthy executive can decide that they are going to stop working at 5 PM and play tennis. Someone who is trying to escape poverty might not have that luxury. The first person's hobby may be a consequence of economic freedom. The second person's obsession with work may be a mechanism for obtaining it. You cannot look at the lifestyle of someone who has already won and assume that every component of that lifestyle was responsible for them winning. Sometimes the lifestyle is the reward, not the cause.

This is where Pierre Bourdieu becomes particularly interesting. Bourdieu's work is useful because he challenged the idea that people's preferences and lifestyles are purely individual choices. He described different forms of capital, particularly economic, cultural and social capital, and argued that people's position in society shapes their dispositions, tastes and opportunities.

Economic capital is fairly obvious: money, wealth and property. Social capital is your network, the relationships and connections that can provide opportunities and resources. Cultural capital is more interesting. It includes things like knowledge, educational credentials, cultural familiarity, tastes and dispositions that are valued in particular social environments. These forms of capital can also reinforce one another.

Take two children. Child A grows up in a wealthy professional family. From childhood, they have books everywhere. They learn piano. They go swimming. They visit museums. They travel internationally. Their parents discuss literature, politics and art at dinner. They are encouraged to experiment with different activities. By the time this child reaches adulthood, they have developed ten different interests. Society looks at them and says, “What a well-rounded person.”

Now take Child B. Their parents have limited financial resources. There are household responsibilities. Vacations are rare. Music lessons aren't an option. The child is encouraged to study because education is seen as the most reliable route to economic mobility. They eventually get a job and start supporting their family. At 25, someone tells them, “You need hobbies. You need to travel. You need to discover yourself.”

The advice isn't necessarily wrong. But it is socially blind. The two people did not start with the same stock of resources. One person had the economic and cultural space to experiment with different interests. The other person had to optimise for survival and mobility.

This is one of the important insights from Bourdieu: what appears to be individual taste and individual choice is often shaped by the social conditions in which people grow up. And this creates an interesting paradox. The wealthy person who spends Sunday playing golf is described as “well-balanced.” The person who spends Sunday working overtime is described as “obsessed with work.” But perhaps the second person is accumulating economic capital precisely so that, ten years later, they have the freedom to live the lifestyle the first person was born into.

This doesn't mean that every person who works excessively is secretly on a noble journey of social mobility. It simply means context matters. The interpretation of work and leisure cannot be separated from the economic, social and cultural circumstances of the person making the choice.

There is also a darker side to this. Sometimes work becomes someone's entire life because work is the only place where they receive recognition. A person may have grown up in an environment where they weren't particularly valued. Then they enter a profession and discover, “I'm good at this.” They get promoted. People respect them. They earn money. Their parents become proud. Their peers admire them. Their competence becomes visible. Their work gives them something they never had before: a stable source of self-worth.

At that point, telling them, “Don't make work your identity,” is almost meaningless. The real question is: why is work carrying so much psychological weight in the first place? Sometimes the answer is ambition. Sometimes it is insecurity. Sometimes it is economic necessity. Sometimes it is social conditioning. Sometimes it is the absence of meaningful relationships. Sometimes it is simply genuine passion. And sometimes it is all of these things at once.

This is why I don't particularly like the simplistic diagnosis of “workaholic.” It turns a complicated social and psychological phenomenon into a personality defect.

Burnout is a real problem, but blaming burnout as an identity problem is a very problematic stance. It erases contextual relevance, stops addressing the problem, and shifts the blame to the victim.

If someone is working twelve hours a day because their organisation is chronically understaffed, telling them to “set boundaries” and “get a hobby” doesn't solve the organisational problem. If someone is working twelve hours a day because they are terrified that their entire sense of worth will collapse if they aren't successful, then the problem may indeed have a psychological component. These are two completely different situations. The solution cannot be identical.

Correlation is not causation. Someone who has no hobbies may be burned out, but that doesn't mean the absence of hobbies caused the burnout. Someone who works constantly may be lonely, but that doesn't mean work caused the loneliness. Someone may have no social life because they work too much, or they may work too much because they have no social life. The direction of causality matters.

So perhaps the better question isn't, “Is work your identity?” Perhaps it is, “What happens to you if you lose your work?”

If someone loses their job and thinks, “That sucks. I'll find another one,” that's probably healthy. If someone loses their job and thinks, “I have lost the only thing that makes me valuable as a human being,” that's a different problem.

And that problem can happen with anything. Your partner can become your identity. Your children can become your identity. Your political ideology can become your identity. Your religion can become your identity. Your fitness can become your identity. Your hobbies can become your identity. Even your opposition to consumerism can become your identity.

The problem isn't work. The problem is allowing any single component of your life to become the sole source of your worth.

In the end, live your life the way you want.

Live and let live.

A hobby done for social approval is worse than having none. Caving into social pressure for validation can backfire if your expectations are not met. The consequences can be dire, as bad as losing self-confidence, financial losses, bitterness, etc.

Consumerism has no end. It's a constant cycle of greed and the need for validation.

You don't have to travel because Instagram told you that successful people travel. You don't have to buy a motorcycle because someone told you that riding through the mountains is what freedom looks like. You don't have to learn guitar because having a hobby makes you “interesting.” And you don't have to abandon work because someone on LinkedIn told you that having a career you're deeply invested in means you've made work your identity.

Maybe you genuinely love your work. Maybe you genuinely love your hobbies. Maybe you love both. Maybe you love neither. Maybe you spend your Sunday hiking. Maybe you spend it reading. Maybe you spend it writing code. Maybe you sit on your balcony listening to music. Maybe you do absolutely nothing, or maybe, you cook a very time consuming dish, to savour and reward yourselves with some dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin.

None of these things makes you inherently more fulfilled than the others.

The point of a hobby was never to prove that you have a life outside work. The point of a hobby was to enjoy the hobby.

Let hobbies be hobbies.