A boy asked me how long I’d been teaching. When I said fifteen years, he asked whether I was burnt out.
I told him no. That probably eighty percent of my interactions with students are positive. I enjoy being around them. They leave me with a weird hope about the future.
“Just like this interaction right now,” I said.
He is not an exceptional student. He tries, he is nice, and I like him. Nothing about that exchange needed to improve a test score to justify its existence.
Yet when we evaluate a career, we reach for salary, advancement, workload, prestige. These matter. But somewhere in that accounting, being glad to see the people who occupy our days gets demoted to a fringe benefit.
Fringe to what?
This is not an argument against measurement. I had just offered a percentage. The mistake is confusing the things our institutions know how to count with the things that make a life worth living. A model can be numerically precise while omitting the variable doing most of the work.
And what disappears from the model becomes available for sacrifice. The conversation looks like an interruption. The unstructured afternoon looks like wasted time. Friendship becomes networking, leisure becomes recovery, and recovery exists to restore productivity. Everything must justify itself by serving something else.
Eventually, living becomes overhead.
The correction is not to put friendship on a dashboard. Recognizing that people contribute to our happiness does not make them happiness equipment. The boy does not owe me optimism, gratitude, or any reassuring theory about human nature. A relationship organized around extracting satisfaction would lose precisely the mutual regard that made it satisfying.
Nor does meaning pay the electric bill. “You love the children” is not compensation, and affection should never become an employer’s discount on someone else’s labor. Material security and human connection are not competing explanations of a good life. They sustain one another.
But our accounting shapes more than career choices. Count every cruelty as evidence about humanity while treating ordinary kindness as background noise, and the world will look worse even when you have fabricated nothing. The error is in what you admit as information.
That boy’s question was not a distraction from the life I am working toward. Neither was my answer.
We keep calling these moments the rewards of a good life, as though the life itself were happening somewhere else.
Related posts
- Bowling Alone, Scrolling Together — On the difference between constant connectivity and the shared practice that makes social life durable.
- Happiness and life's value — An earlier reflection on enjoyment, close friendship, and finding meaning in the life we actually inhabit.
- On happiness — Sharing Simon Critchley’s argument that happiness concerns the quality of a life, not a numerical total.
- Meaning and Friction — On challenge, agency, and the possibility that removing difficulty also removes sources of meaning.
- Optimization Is the Enemy of the Future — How the pursuit of efficiency can consume the reserves that make a system resilient.
