I think the idea that they can is useful to some , and has been used both by employers and employees for different ends at different times. I’m reminded of this very charming American Labor Movement poster arguing for a 40 day workweek.

But I don’t think the separation it tries to celebrate has ever been achievable. Time to yourself can never be fully detached from time spent elsewhere.

I feel like I’ve learned my body and its energy levels quite well. My most productive hours are the few hours after I wake up. And having to spend those in the train to work and then at work itself, on sometimes some of the pointless things in existence, was truly soul crushing.

For me, there was a unique torture in feeling the poetry flowing within me and having to draft some bullshit email or sit motionless in a meeting or have to type my ideas in a rush on my phone walking to work in the middle of a thousand other stressed-out New Yorkers. And by the time, I got home, that ocean of song would have inevitably fallen dead.

That being said, however, there are jobs I’ve had that have supercharged my writing with time. My first job out of grad-school was as an analyst at a hedge-fund, trading energy futures. I had a rough time in that role, but there were a lot of things I learned and had a rude awakening to there that I know have edified me as a person. I’ve thought of writing about it more directly, but I’ve chosen over and over not to, because I find parts of it everywhere else (everything from the math, which often involved subjects beyond my engineering curriculum like Complex Analysis, to everything I had to learn about humans and what becomes of them when they worship at the idol-altar of money).

I don’t think I would be half as interesting of a writer as I am now without having had to work as an engineer for several years now. I can think of a few other writers in this vein: Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Conrad etc. And I can think of a lot of contemporary writers who have a doubtless gift for expression but, because they are coddled nepo-babies and always have been, have nothing meaningful to say, because they aren’t trying to find poetry in the unspoken, only in the spoken-a-thousand-times-already. Nor would they know where to find the unspoken if given a map with it marked under an X.

I don’t believe there is a unity in the self. You are not one thing and never have been. You are an amalgamation of perceptions (chosen and unchosen) and subsequent thought processes all forced into a space where one can see the other, called the self. That said, however, because every part of ourselves affects every other, I do believe we all work better for ourselves when we consider ourselves a self. In the same way that teams work together with ample communication and when in unison towards the same goals.

Therefore, try to unify your work and your writing as best you can. Let one lean on the other, and let them unify in you as parts of a unified project. There are jobs for which this is obviously easier for and jobs for which this is obviously harder for, and there’s always going to be some level of dissonance between the two.

But I think that’s the only way for them to exist peacefully beside each other. Otherwise, they will always be in conflict because they have different needs, and one is always going to try and eliminate the other.

I’m not sure! I’m pretty the scholars don’t really know either. But it is strange that it has to be difficult. We don’t have the same difficulty representing information in very different ways in other contexts. So yes, there is something about language!

I think it’s because our consciousness and our capacity to communicate are deeply entwined. My belief is that our ability to perceive our own thoughts probably came about in order to, or was at least instrumental to, communicate. I don’t feel like we would have needed the fidelity to examine our thoughts that we do if we hadn’t needed to clearly communicate them. There are lot of other things our body is fine relegating to the completely unconscious. I feel this way because I’ve seen over and over again that I do not know my thoughts until I express them.

All this to state the obvious: that learning a new language is often learning an entirely new way of ordering your thoughts. It also changes the thoughts that are closer to you and within reach.

I think a reason ancient literary languages became liturgical so quickly (like Biblical Hebrew, Sanskrit, Quranic Arabic) is because people found that their thoughts automatically point more to God when thinking in those languages, because thoughts about God are all they ever heard expressed in that language! So it became a firewall, keeping regular thoughts, expressed most commonly in regular speech, out.

I don’t think language is thought and therefore God / Divine Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) like a lot of Hindu as well as Christian and Jewish and Muslim sages have believed. But I do believe it is the best vehicle to examine thought. Learning a new language, at the very least, gives you an entirely new entryway into your thoughts.

Perhaps writers might be scared by this idea, but something I noticed happening once I started learning more languages well is that my internal dialogue got quieter. And now, I don’t hear it at all unless I want to. I remember how, when I could only really claim to express myself well in one language, how all my thoughts would come to me only as I would have expressed them in English. I would save images I saw with captions, which were the words that came to my mind when seeing that image. But after learning a few languages very well, I’ve found that thoughts no longer come to me in words. They come to as something more basic.

I think that more fundamental form of thought has always existed in me, beneath the words that used to make up my internal dialogue, but I suppose it lingers there without needing translation now that I have multiple avenues to express it. It allows me to linger on the raw experience of that for longer. But I also I find that it makes them more fleeting. I can fix them in place, of course, by translating them, assigning them words in one language or another, but that would be taking a photocopy of them. You lose information, compress it, when you do so and can’t always go back to the raw data as easily.

The benefits of learning a language on brain health are clearly demonstrated in the scientific literature, but I do think learning a language is in some capacity more fundamentally empowering for your thought processes than an equivalent activity that stimulates the brain as much but doesn’t force you to restructure your thoughts as fundamentally. I do believe it helped me unlock a greater level of abstraction in my mind. If there’s a double-blind controlled study with an impressive sample size that refutes that idea, please fold it into a paper airplane and fly it towards me. I will review it in my leisure.

Anywho, I don’t know why it’s hard. I don’t know why anything has to be hard. I don’t know why life has to come with its difficulties in order to be meaningful, but it does, and here we are within it, alive. So enjoy your thoughts while you can, in whatever language you can. They’re all you have. You have never experienced anything outside of your thoughts.

In terms of advice on learning languages, do as the Youtube videos with thumbnails such as “This One Insane Language Learning Trick Changed My Life! (100% Fluent Native Accent)” say you must do. Most of it is good advice for people who are very lost and don’t know where to begin.

But a piece of advice I would give, and which they rarely do, is this: learn your own language first. Try to find a course dedicated to teaching your native language to non-natives. That, surely, can’t be intimidating! Learn the names of all the tenses and parts of speech you use every day but never even really thought had a name. Once you’ve done this, it’ll be easier for you to understand the structure of another language, because at least now you’re familiar with the structure of your own. Expect to rethink so much of your own thoughts as you do this. You’ll already find yourself investigating your thoughts deeper as you do this.

Recursive thoughts, thoughts about thoughts, thinking about thinking, in Cabalistic Judaism as well as Buddhism and pretty much all branches of Non-Dualistic Hindu Philosophy, are considered the bedrock of spiritual thinking. And perhaps, you need to join us, on this side of the river of language, to see why we say so.

Language is such a beautiful tool. If I ever had to re-write Genesis, I would have Eve grasp for the fruit of knowledge and Adam grasp for the fruit of language to express that knowledge. I don’t think one would have reason to exist without the other. I think it was the utility in expressing our perspective that made it important to have a perspective, thus creating the self, thus pushing us out of Eden, into this strange fugue state called consciousness, where we see the Dao, and the world and Spinoza’s God, unfolding continually before us but can no longer simply be a part of it, here where we feel we must ask questions about its every turn, even though we know the true reasons for things are indelibly beyond us, and always will be.

That sounds like a beautiful project! I still remember when my mother told me the story of Kannagi as a child and reading the Amar Chitra Katha comic book retelling of it.

If you want courage, I would meditate on just how beautiful and transgressive of a story it is and how lucky we are as Tamil people to have it as one of our founding poetic works.

I won’t say it’s progressive in our modern sense, but the way it represents female anger as purifying is something that would still disturb, let’s say, more “traditionally minded” people. And paying attention to women’s anger instead of dismissing it outright is still something we struggle with.

But I think more fundamentally, like the Bhagavad Gita says: all you’re entitled to is your labor, not the rewards you imagine coming from it. So lose yourself in the labor, and try to find it fun and exciting for its own sake. Don’t fixate on it as a finished project, and soon you’ll have something beautiful.

Thank you so much for the thoughtful question!

Firstly, obviously the solution to burnout is rest, but I think rest is a lot harder than people imagine. What I’ve figured out, for me is that feeling truly rested hinges on I) my physical body feeling stable (like it’s eaten enough, got enough sleep, etc.) and 2) my desire to get back to work and my capacity to find it interesting

I’ve found that taking time away from work only achieves the first. I’ve discovered that, for me, rest needs to be active. It needs to be something that’s tiring in its own way: time spent on an activity I’m excited to make progress on, but which is unrelated to what I’m burned out from.

Something that worked for me is giving myself a “Shabbos” haha, one day a week in which I don’t allow myself to work on my your tasks and instead spend it in active rest.

As to the second question: that feeling will never leave you. There’s a letter Steinbeck wrote to a friend where, even after multiple best-sellers, he still remains riddled with self doubt. There’s a beautiful book called “Of Course You Always End Up Becoming Yourself” that goes through the same journey with David Foster-Wallace.

You have to give yourself the hope that it’s worth the time and labor. It’s a hope you have to find for yourself.

There is no lasting source of external validation to give it to you. So just believe that your work is beautiful, and if you believe it, and don’t forget to believe it, I think, that feeling will soon disappear in time!