On Monday night, after writing about burnout for #ship30for30, I went on a walk with another woman in tech and found out she was going through some of her own.

"People tell me I'm crushing it, that I'm doing the best work in my cohort and role. I got promoted twice in a year. But I have the suspicion that I'm getting taken advantage of... that I'm doing other people's jobs."

You probably are, I said.

"I already pay my therapist to tell me that," she said. We laughed.

She offered a framework of eudaemonic pleasure-- taking joy in the purpose and ends of the work you are doing, rather than in the tasks themselves. Unlike hedonic pleasure--joy in work for its own sake--eudaemonia speaks to the sense that what one is doing in life corresponds in some level with one's highest virtues.

Caring for the sick. Teaching children. Fighting for justice.

Ah, yes--nursing, teaching, and activism--some of the professions with the lowest pay and the most burnout. Indeed, I have never been so miserable at work as when I was doing work I deeply believed in. Every personal failure was a point of shame; every failure of someone else was a dangerous blocker of the arc of history toward justice.

I think of an insight from Heidi Priebe, one of the absolute best mental health YouTubers: self-abandonment happen when the inner children in us can't count on the inner parents in us to take care of our own needs; typically, all kinds of tantrums result, burnout among them. Maybe our inner children put off their needs so much when doing The Right Thing, their life's work, that it can be hard to sustain when the work (sometimes, inevitably) fails. I think of the Buddhist principle of nonattachment, and wonder: How can we trust eudaemonic pleasure when results are not in our control?

But I also think of everything neuroscience has taught us about hedonic adaptation and numbing behaviors and addiction loops and the body's dopamine-pathway determination toward the new and shiny and surprising over what is steady, predictable, true. Adults do hard things. How can we trust hedonic pleasure to lead us toward growth and not decay?

And I think of my own reluctance to write short essays with perfectly crisp takeaways, the tantrum my somatic system threw this weekend at the idea of having to share yet another 3-point actionable piece on LinkedIn, and how I calmed it: by deciding that perhaps I don't have an answer on this, only a pile of questions.

Instead, I welcome you to tell me. Why should we work? If blessed with the gift of an easy survival, how should we live?