Question: “9-5 related burnout is affecting my creativity. How do I balance the ‘professional’ and ‘creative’?”

Would it be harsh to say that I don’t think there’s any real way to balance them?

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.

Poem 13 from Gitanjali, about the pain in being away from your creative mind when a flood of song was scheduled to flow through you.

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.

Another prayer from Tagore’s Gitanjali to help you, fellow traveller, through all your travails.