For the most part, my last job was not so bad. I was good at it, and it paid well. On the other hand, it sucked. See, that's my coping mechanism: telling myself "things could be worse," thus I should be content with who I am now and how my life is. But that still didn't stop me from blaming work for the general dissatisfaction in my life. I was a workaholic when I was younger, playing into the insecurity of having to prove myself by being a good worker. So much so, that I had built an identity and self-worth around it. It was many years later when I realized how much this sucked and what a dangerous game it could be. If I based my self-worth around something external to myself, my identity was basically beholden to something I couldn't ultimately control. And it made me hate working. And hate myself for putting up with it. And angry at the world for requiring me to work to make it. It was a scam of the highest degree. And if you're listening to economic indicators and seeing the price of groceries nowadays, it just feels like the whole world is against you, pushing you into this perpetual social contract of giving up the most valuable part of your life just so you don't die and starve to death. So, I made sure I was in a relatively good spot, and I stopped working. And then all my dreams came true! Ha, not really. I had some preconceived notions that work was strictly about the transaction of selling my time to any company who wanted to buy it. But then I'd think about the first thing someone would ask me if I were meeting them for the first time: "What kind of work do you do?" It's so easy to conflate your work with who you are. But is it really conflation that's happening here? When I stopped working - when I got rid of this "icky" thing in my life - I assumed that it would generally just improve on its own. It did not. So, what the heck was going on here? Maybe it really wasn't work that was making me generally unhappy with life. Granted, I can't change the economics of society (I still need to pay rent), but for a short period, I could at least control what I did when I woke up each day. I started thinking: what does it really mean when someone asks, "What kind of work do you do?" Maybe what they're really asking is: "Who are you, as a person?", because there's an underlying assumption that what you do and how you spend your time defines you as a person... right? And that's where I'm stuck. I'm not really doing anything. I am learning to make a game, but considering I haven't released a single game yet, I still do not have the confidence to call myself a game developer. Maybe one day.