I have an addictive personality – I can turn just about anything into too much of a good thing. I think meditation is about the only thing I’ve found that I can obsess about and it doesn’t do me harm somehow. I have a lifelong addiction to TV. I’m kind of strung out on the cat. I eat compulsively. I have a job that I love, that offers me flow for hours at a time, and for my good performance, I am showered with praise. Have I addicted myself to work? Well…let’s talk about that. 

I am madly in love with my work. I’ve always brought my mother’s fierce work ethic to every job, no matter how mundane, and after a few years of working hard at careers that were an odd fit, I have found work that is a perfect match to my skills, my interests, and the kinds of people I want to work with. I am enormously fortunate to genuinely enjoy nearly every aspect of my work, and even when it’s stressful, I bounce out of bed most days eagerly looking forward to what the work day will hold. And instead of paying for these rockin’ experiences, they pay me. We should all be so lucky.  

My work is linked to school calendars, and follows a seasonal schedule. When it’s on, it’s on – 12-hour days 6 days a week, tossing and turning in bed because I can’t stop thinking about the problem I left unresolved when I shut down my computer, cutting time with loved ones short to get back to work. That sounds like a workaholic life to me. One thing I always think about addiction: People who aren’t addicted never ask themselves if they are addicted – they know they aren’t. If I even have to pose the question, it’s because there’s a problem. 

But then. Half of the year, it’s pretty darn quiet. The work drops off, and I can go days at a time without time pressures. If those kinds of days felt scary and impossible to fill, I would agree that I have replaced alcohol with work. But I love those days just as much as I love the intense states of flow I get from my work-filled days. I write a bunch, meditate more, go on extra walks, get a little TV in. They are equally satisfying (although I do find it a little harder – but not impossible – to avoid overeating). 

When it’s pretty quiet, it’s easy to drop work to focus on the things that matter. Fatberry wants into my lap. My brother across the country calls in the middle of the day. Dan and I actually have lunch together. During busy times, it’s more of a struggle. I’ve only been through one busy season in a work-from-home setting, and I wasn’t perfect about dropping everything because something awesome was happening, but I did okay. 

The Bergen Work Addiction Scale has…mostly good news for me. The only one I consistently score as “Often” is that others have told me I work too much, and I don’t listen – and that’s a big deal. When it’s busy, work can keep me from spending time with Dan, friends, and family. However, it’s very notable that I do NOT throw myself into work in order to avoid spending time with friends or family – when it’s not busy, that’s the first thing I want to do. But my mom has told me, not in so many words, that she gets concerned about the hours I put in, and that she feels I don’t make time for her. And Dan tells me all the time he thinks I work too much. 

These are not easy points to dismiss. No one knows me better than Dan and my mom. No one has a better perspective on whether the ways I choose to spend my time are damaging and unhealthy. As an addict, I am a wrong-thinking person – I am wrong so often that I’ve let my brain get hijacked by all kinds of maladaptive behaviors. If these people, who have perspective on me that I lack, who think about me more clearly than I think about myself, if they look at me and see a problem here, I have to listen.  

Now, are my feelings of self-worth overly tied up in how I’m performing at work? Absolutely. When things are going well, I feel bulletproof. When I make a mistake, it’s a catastrophe. I write for the sales team, and over the past few years, I’ve gotten pretty good at modestly celebrating the wins, and shrugging off the losses. However, when I’m unskillful in email or in a meeting, I am really hard on myself about that. It’s a cognitive distortion to think that people are zeroed in on the one thing I do wrong instead of the hundred things I do right. That’s not the same as being addicted to work – browbeating myself for interpersonal SNAFUs is not the same as working compulsively. It’s overidentification, not addiction. 

But then there’s the broad definition of addiction – continued use despite adverse consequences. In 2019 I learned a tough lesson about working when I should have been taking care of something actually important, when my cat was terminally sick and I waited for the work to be done before taking him to the vet. I’ve regretted that, and tried to learn from it. Was that a painful lesson, or a symptom of a huge problem? If it was a huge problem, have I corrected it, or just postponed until the next time I let work keep me from taking care of someone I love? Or, is everyone who both works and takes care of someone else going to occasionally run into competing demands (and sometimes work wins)? 

So I come to the conclusion without any kind of satisfactory resolution. Am I explaining away a bona fide work addiction with rationalizations and justifications? Or just living in a complicated world without easy answers? Will I look back on this in a few years, after I’ve lost a lot to a work addiction, and see only in retrospect how self-deluding my words are today? Does effing everything have to be a question of healthy functioning versus addiction, or do we just have to make choices sometimes? It’s not so much a conclusion as just the place where I’m going to arbitrarily stop writing now. What will become of this? I am still in the middle of figuring it out.