Heaven Adjacent

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

“I didn’t know you hated your work,” he said. “Of course I hated it. Who wouldn’t?” “Then why did you do it all those years?” “Now that, my son, is a question for the ages. It’s more or less what I came out here to try to answer. Why do we do work we hate all our lives? Somewhere earlier on the road somebody must have made us feel that we didn’t have an option to do otherwise. I’m sure it gets psychologically complex.”

It’s hard to make a change after so many years, and we don’t want to let people down by breaking our promises. But what we do to those poor people is worse. We blame them for the fact that we’re not happy. Because that’s easier than blaming ourselves. Because if we blame ourselves, then we have to fix it, and that’s a tricky thing.”

Why do we live like we’re not going to die?”