Six thoughts on work

Doing hard things with other people

I’ve been working a lot in the last few weeks. I try very hard to write a little bit every night, and I have not managed that in recent days. But I made a resolution to publish a blog post every week in 2026, and dammit, this is not the week I’m going to break my streak.¹ Here are six thoughts about what it is to work hard alongside others:

1. Working long hours with someone on something difficult and important is a deeply intimate thing. It breaks down some of the norms of our individualistic culture.² You can’t ignore each other. You are forced to feel pain from one another’s shortcomings. You tell each other things like, “You really do need to cancel your dinner plans and work late tonight” and “You really fucked that up.” When I coauthored a report with my now-husband, we got much more frustrated with each other than we normally do but I also felt closer to him than I normally do. I would love to work with him again.³

2. I know it’s supposed to be healthy to have friends outside your insular workaholic subcommunity. But it is also a great privilege to get to witness your friends hard at work on something that deeply matters. It makes a person more three dimensional.

3. If you haven’t actually worked with someone on something, it is very hard to know just how good they are at what they do, and the precise ways in which they are good at what they’re good at and bad at what they’re bad at. Heuristics like their organization and their title and their vague reputation and how smart they sound are all very lossy.

4. There’s no good substitute for a real external constraint. There have been many periods in my life where I pushed and guilted myself to work more on nebulous and poorly-scoped research projects, fighting through psychic resistance to eke out a few more hours here and there. There are other times when work is simply wrenched out of me — when I simply must get back to this person today or give that talk tomorrow. This work can tire the body, but there is so much less resistance from the soul. Doing reps of this is great for building self-trust.

5. Having less time for everything else makes me more deeply appreciate diminishing returns. The first twenty minutes of seeing my housemates or my husband is just so good.

6. People usually express a lot of sympathy for you in periods of very high stress and very hard work, and it’s not undeserved. But the dirty little secret is that such stretches can also be very fun. Everything is funnier when you’re sleep deprived.

1. If you’re wondering why there isn’t a post every week on this blog, it’s because some of them are over at Planned Obsolescence.

2. To be clear, I’m mostly a pretty big fan of our individualistic culture.

3. I imagine that there’s a similar dimension of intimacy you unlock in a marriage from raising children together. There’s not much of a substitute for doing something with real stakes that you are both invested in and both responsible for.