We all want to belong. From the moment we take our first steps into school, society teaches us that our worth is tied to achievement, to being someone, doing something, building something.
We grow in years, in experience, in titles. Somewhere along the way that hunger for belonging becomes tangled with the need to feel enough through what we do or produce.
I have come to realise that I’m married to work. Not in the romantic sense, but in the way it occupies my thoughts, dictates my moods and defines my sense of worth. For many of us this relationship starts innocently. We pour ourselves into our studies, our first jobs and the careers that follow. We tell ourselves it is ambition, that this is what success looks like.
Then life shifts. From my observation the children one raises grow into their own people. The career ladder one has climbed so relentlessly begins to feel less like an ascent and more like a treadmill. One morning one wakes up and wonders who one is outside of one’s job title, outside the roles one has played so diligently for years.
I see it all around me. Friends who feel lost when they are not working. Parents who struggle to rest because they do not know who they are beyond their families. Colleagues who measure their worth by their productivity. And I see it in myself too. I often say I am married to my work, half as a joke, half as a confession. Work gives me purpose and stability. It keeps me focused. But it also keeps me busy enough not to think too much about the deeper, messier parts of life.
That is the danger, I think , when we start confusing doing with being. When our sense of worth is tied to what we do rather than who we are.
My generation was raised in a world that celebrates hustle and glorifies busyness. We were told to dream big, work harder and never settle.
I do not want to wake up one day and realise that I built my life entirely around my work, that I poured so much into becoming someone that I forgot simply how to be. Work, like parenthood, can be a beautiful calling. It gives purpose, structure and sometimes even meaning. But it can also become a hiding place , a convenient distraction from the quieter work of being human. There is safety in emails, meetings and deadlines. There is clarity in schedules and targets. The messiness of inner life, loneliness, grief, uncertainty, can always wait for later.
Except “later” always comes. It comes when the office lights dim and the house is quiet. It comes when promotions lose their thrill, when children leave home or when one’s body reminds one it has limits even when one’s will does not. It comes when one finally has time and the silence asks “Who are you now?”
I do not have the balance figured out yet, far from it. But I am beginning to understand I cannot keep defining myself by what I do. So I am trying. Trying to be gentler with myself. Trying to measure my days not by how much I achieve, but by how present I am. Because when the noise fades and the accolades mean less what will matter most is whether I still recognise myself. Whether I can belong to me, not to my work, not to anyone else, but to the quiet truth of who I am becoming.
