I read somewhere that to find work you don’t mind doing, you have to figure out what problems you like to have. That’s an interesting angle to take on the problem of work, if it is a problem. It speaks to the fact that no job worth your time is going to be effortless; it’s worth expanding that notion to say that life isn’t particularly rewarding if you’re not in the active process of solving problems. I think it’s fair to say that even crossword puzzles and notionally fun things are often problems to solve; this keeps your brain healthy and active. AND: using cognitive energy burns calories.

Here are some things I don’t mind tangling with:

• Computer problems: I like troubleshooting tech issues. I don’t solve all of them, for sure, but I am able to figure out most things. People always ask me how I got “good” with computers, and it’s a simple answer: motivation and Google. (And by Google, I mean AI and YouTube and Stack Overflow and Reddit and you get it.) I like when people ask me how to do things at work and at home, I even liked troubleshooting my kids’ Windows issues when I was a die-hard Mac user.
• Certain mundane household tasks: I like folding towels (but nothing else). I like folding up foil for chickenbags. I like making pourover coffee, measuring everything, creasing the number 4 Melita filter paper, dampening it with hot water before adding the freshly ground beans. I like slicing chicken breasts into three thin cutlets with my razor-sharp Henckels 10″ knife. I like sharpening my chef’s knives and cleaver. I like crafting our nightly preprandial, currently Manhattans: I measure everything to the gram, thinly slice orange garnishes, and crack big ice cubes with due care.
• Writing this blog: I get a great kick out of writing here at Uncorrected. I need to do a couple of things before I settled in: I had to decide what it was about (it’s about nothing… it’s about whatever catches my eye… it’s about tech, cooking, exercise, ephemera). It is, in the classical sense of a blog, about a person with a penchant for writing doing just that. I like to think, and writing is thinking. It gives me great pleasure sometimes to just go back and read what I wrote. I like it so much more than social media. It’s the original social media, and maybe I’m just a crufty middle-aged guy, but that’s me. I write here; I think here. I like having a draft open before me, uploading media to WordPress. I like mulling over a post while I’m mucking about outside. I like dropping ideas into Todoist for later inspiration.