‘I thought that there was no way I would or could quit only a short time after qualifying – I’d worked so hard to get there. I would be letting myself down.’ This kind of thinking resembles what economists describe as a decision based on ‘sunk costs’: if you buy an expensive pair of shoes that turn out to be incredibly uncomfortable, you won’t want

‘If the diver always thought of the shark, he would never lay hands on the pearl,’ said Sa’di, a Persian poet from the thirteenth century.

In his book Good Work, the visionary economic thinker E.F. Schumacher lyrically describes the ‘longing for freedom’ that has become so widespread in Western society. This desire, he says, encapsulates a range of liberating ideas:

From the 1820s, writes one historian, ‘many job advertisements asked applicants to submit a phrenological report along with their letter of reference’, and thousands were issued with career guidance based on their head measurements.

our working identity is not a hidden treasure waiting to be discovered at the very core of our being – rather, it is made up of many possibilities . . . we are many selves.53

Take the case of the American poet Wallace Stevens. By day he worked in an insurance company, eventually becoming vice-president of an established firm in Connecticut. But he was no workaholic: he returned home each evening to write verse, and was considered one of the great modernist poets of the early twentieth century. Stevens kept these two liv

the ancient Greeks’ aspiration to perform some virtuous and noble deed that would give their lives a sense of purpose and ensure their immortality in historical memory.

I don’t want to join the rat race. Not be enslaved by machines, bureaucracies, boredom, ugliness. I don’t want to be a moron, robot, commuter. I don’t want to become a fragment of a person. I want to do my own thing. I want to live (relatively) simply. I want to deal with people, not masks. People matter. Nature matters. Beauty matters. Wholeness m

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labour and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To hims