Where is the Life you have Lost in Making a Living

Most of us have a day job or a business we depend on to make a living. But have you ever woken up with a faint, unsettling feeling that there must be something more to life than the act of making a living?

To live is to work, and to work is to expend energy in exchange for value. Living a life, then, is to expend the energy of a lifetime in exchange for value. The primary value we seek is survival—arranging food, shelter, clothing, and a few comforts along the way. That is making a living: a survival imperative. Then comes the question that will not leave you alone: What should I do with my life? What is the value I am seeking in it?

This indifferent universe—vast, hostile, and seemingly accidental—puts enormous demand on living. The business of living consumes nearly all our attention. For most people, whatever energy remains is pulled downward by the senses—food, sex, love, fame, power. In other words, we are consumed by our own consumptions. The rest are caught between boredom and inertia.

But a few feel a quiet discontent—an unfulfilled, unsettling sense that there must be something more to life. Mere survival no longer satisfies them; they feel an appetite for more life. This appetite is the evolutionary force seeking freedom in action. Yet they do not know what to do with their life.

I will not invoke your gods; perhaps no one now seeks the kingdom of heaven. Maybe none of us is any longer in search of Moksha, Nirvana, or Enlightenment. Let us, then, turn to biology and history for a clue. Birds have no history—nor do squirrels or cows. Humans alone are historical beings. Why? Because among all living creatures, only humans can think, can hold an image long enough to reflect upon it. In other words, only humans possess the capacity to create.

For the majority, life is to eat, to sleep, to reproduce, and to die. What differentiates humans from animals is this capacity to create. Making a living is an act of survival; living a life is an act of creation. To live actively is to give form to the creative capacity that is unique to us—to create, and through creation, to expand consciousness.

Humans invented symbols—and that was the beginning of history. Civilization was built by those who started a side project from the business of living. They invented the symbolic domains that shaped the fields of human action. In other words, they created art.

Our psyche exists in a constant state of entropy. The work of art—or any skillful action—arrests this entropy, expands consciousness, and allows us to experience our peak. By contrast, the day job often has no shape. It is fragmented by design—a product of division of labour. It triggers a sense of alienation that makes one feel pointless, listless, and meaningless.

The Flow Research Collective, a research and training organisation, notes that the average knowledge worker is truly productive for only 2.3 hours a day. In that same day, they are interrupted 56 times, check their email 36 times an hour, and lose focus roughly every 11 minutes—taking nearly twice that time to recover it. Each week, half a day disappears into redoing what was already done. Each month, 36 hours dissolve in meetings that serve little purpose. The modern workplace, it seems, has become a system exquisitely designed to fracture our attention—and with it, our sense of meaning.

Yet attention is not a minor resource; it is the entry point to everything that makes us human: depth, presence, creation. Without it, work becomes mechanical, and knowledge, stripped of art, turns brutal. Such knowledge work without art is brutality.

A person must discover their own field of action—work that has shape, that arrests attention, and becomes a medium for expanding consciousness. The world is full of bullshit jobs. Organisations and institutions rarely create work as a means to engage the individual’s creative capacity; their motive is profit, and humans are reduced to resources.

What matters is the shape of work in the symbolic domain—work that requires you to learn and master skills, that has form and provides feedback, that allows deliberate practice. In other words: do art.

Paul Graham—the British-born computer scientist, painter, entrepreneur, and essayist—once wrote that the art of doing great work is to do the work that matters. It sounds simple, but it isn’t. To illustrate, he offers what he calls the bus-ticket collector theory. Imagine someone who spends a lifetime obsessively collecting bus tickets. The obsession is real, the dedication total—but does it matter?

Graham’s point is not to mock obsession, but to ask: what separates the obsessions that change the world—those of an Einstein, a Picasso, a Darwin—from the ones that merely consume a life? The difference lies in meaning: great work is not just the product of focus, but of focus directed toward something that enlarges the human horizon.

The kind of work that matters is not random effort, but work with structure. It has a goal at every stage and offers clear feedback. It grants a sense of control, not chaos. It doesn’t steal your attention every eleven minutes; it arrests it. Yet discovering what to work on, in a society built on endless production and consumption, is no simple task. The machinery of modern life leaves us overwhelmed, uncertain of what truly calls to us. So what do you do? How do you discover the work that is yours—the work that matters?

Search for guidance and you’ll find no shortage of advice. Google it. Go to YouTube and type Steve Jobs Stanford speech. You’ll hear the familiar refrain: “You’ve got to find what you love.” Variations of the same mantra echo everywhere—follow your dream, listen to your heart, find your calling, follow your bliss, discover your element, pursue your passion. It all sounds inspiring, until you realise how hollow it can feel.

You might say to yourself, Very well—but I have no special talent, no genius, no burning passion to follow. I don’t even have a dream. Then what? What should one do with one’s life when all the usual maps fail?

The first step toward finding the work to which you can dedicate your life is deceptively simple: cultivate time, space, and energy—the very resources consumed by the business of getting and spending. Make room to do nothing. Let silence and stillness return. And from that quiet, begin to do something—not driven by utility or the imperatives of survival, but by curiosity, wonder, and the slow awakening of genuine interest.

Observe what arrests your attention. Follow your curiosity. Expose yourself to different fields of action. Chances are, you’ve already been investing your time, effort, and energy in something that quietly matters to you. Begin there. Work with the intent of creating a body of work—something that endures, that reflects the movement of your thought and the texture of your life.

And what should you do with your nine-to-five job? Keep doing it. Chances are, you’ll show up to it more cheerfully—and it will take care of your money problem. You are your own patron. The work that matters will not be handed to you by an institution or a grant; it will grow out of the hours you reclaim for yourself.

Action depends on energy; energy, in turn, depends on the concentration of will. But will itself needs a stimulus—a reason to move. One form of it is the will to survive; the other, more subtle and distinctly human, is the will to purpose. The first is necessity—action born of survival. The second is freedom in action—the will discovering its own direction, its own meaning. And often, it finds this intuitively, guided by an inner sense of rightness rather than external command.

And if you find yourself waking with that strange, unshakable feeling that there must be something more to life—chances are, it is time to commit to living one.