What do you do besides work?

These days, it’s in vogue to be overachieving, forever busy people. In conversation, we’re expected to answer the very pointed question, ‘What do you do besides work?’, to which honest answers: lay on the couch and watch TV, scribble in a notebook, fiddle with plants in the garden while seated in stupor with a glazed look on one’s face, are unsatisfactory.

That very leading question expects us to in an instant, deconstruct our lives like a pie chart. Work or study is seen as a large part, but we are expected to provide an answer that reveals our true selves. This answer usually ends in ‘-ing’. ‘-ing’, not in the midst of an activity, but in it’s transformative noun like form. A person who answers ‘swimming’ will be a worker but in reality, a swimmer, the person answering ‘drawing’, a part time artist.

In all fields of life this question resurfaces. In a new recognition that work can’t define one’s life in a holistic way, it is demanded of us that we define our life in a similarly holistic, but other way. We can only give singular answers that are definitive in their revelation of our souls- it’s inappropriate to voice the truth: we spend time doing many things, a lot of which are inconsequential but nevertheless provide us with immense joy. Fiddle with instruments with no quest to be a ‘musician’. Toss rubber balls at the wall with no quest to be ‘an athlete’.

It is ironic that in many people’s quest to get others to prove to them that they have a life outside of work, they inadvertently arouse the same spirit of competition and status that they are seemingly shunning. That in their definition of ‘life outside work’, they end up neglecting a large proportion of its joys: pockets of time spent living for the moment, engaging in diverse activities from which we derive immense pleasure, but serve us no utilitarian value.