Yesterday I turned 50. My favorite comment about turning 50 comes from my dad, who asked my grandfather (his father), while we were having pizza and drinks, when he turned 50, “How does it feel to have a son who’s a half-a-century old?”

Half a century. Wow.

Health: I wrote last year about turning 49 that I had lost 70 pounds. It’s closer to 90 now. I’m probably in better shape than I’ve ever been in my life. I’ve never been an athlete, but I’ve spent a considerable portion of my time exercising since high school because I’m prone to being chubby. I’ve jogged, cycled, walked, jumped rope, lifted weights, rowed on an ergometer, and more. I reflected the other day that I can wear pants in sizes that I only remember from 8th grade. I don’t take blood pressure meds any more or cholesterol meds.

I didn’t do much: I exercise about half an hour a day, and I watch my caloric input. I don’t abstain from any foods, but I generally try to stay away from dense carbohydrate-heavy foods, moderate my alcohol intake, and log what I put in my body. I try to be fairly precise when I can be so that I have a decent understanding of what I’ve eaten (mostly how much) when I can’t weigh my food.

But you realize one day that it’s not a thing that stops, it’s not a goal you achieve and that’s the end of it and you check it off and walk away from it. It’s always going to be a thing to attend to, a consideration, maybe a chore, maybe a source of frustration.

It’s like life that way.

Work: Freud said “love and work.” As a matter of sheer time and energy, it’s what I probably spend the most on. I’m lucky to have been able to find a career versus a job. There are things about work I don’t enjoy fully (as a fit for my personality), and things I love. I made the fourth major career move of my life. Fingers crossed! Change is never easy.

It’s like life that way, too.

Not Work\^1\: I’ve long felt a nagging sense of guilt about doing non-work things, because there’s always work hanging out there. The benefit of many years of work experience includes seeing other people who you respect professionally struggle with the same things you do: too much to do, too little bandwidth, material restrictions, etc.

One of my thoughts has been, to the degree that I really enjoy technology, my pursuits and interests are often in the personal productivity sphere. I like to try out to-do applications. I switch between them from time to time and like to enumerate their differences. I spend a lot of time thinking about the best way to handle email. I think a lot about my digital filing system and my reference system, and have similarly hopped between apps like Yojimbo, EverNote, DEVONThink, and other apps.

To a great extent, these areas of interest support my professional work (although I do by all means use OmniFocus for home project management, and my notes apps–currently Apple’s Notes–are full of home info, too). Were I to no longer have a position such as I do now due to infirmity, retirement, or something else, would I have this areas of interest? Would I think so much about them?

But one thing I’ve been trying to remind myself is that people exist outside of their identity as an employee. In the same way that I don’t expect anyone who works for me to be solely concerned with their work, but to have interests and lives outside of work, I too should not only feel free to cultivate this “other side” of my life, but should find it important. This doesn’t mean not caring about work, it means caring about the gestalt of my human existence. This includes work, but isn’t limited to it.

Back to Freud:

“Love and work….work and love, that’s all there is.”

What did Freud mean here? That one had family and work, and that was it? Regarding love, he meant a dedication to something greater than ourselves. That sounds simple, but it can be difficult to do. It’s easy to swing too far in the other direction, and forget the self.

Regarding work, though: He didn’t necessarily mean “a job” or “salary,” but again, he meant something beyond ourselves. Work, in this sense, is something productive or generative. And when compared with more passive modes of spending one’s time, blogging about things we care about can certainly fit this bill. It is a dedication to something purely option, a willing of ideas into the world.

Americans are greatly, tragically obsessed with productivity and identifying with their job/occupation. But interesting people are interesting not entirely related to–or possibly wholly exclusive of)–their jobs. It’s not that it doesn’t count, but it might have nothing to do with it. Or it might have to do with the interplay between their interests and predilections, and how we bring those to bear on our work.

When I imagine myself not working, I have to imagine a person with interests and ideas and goals that are not associated with work. And all of them have to be meaningful–viable–outside of professional considerations.

\^1\ This bit was originally written under the title “Not Everything is About Money”