An Excess of Possible Selves
A few mornings ago, I sat down to work as I always do: at about ten, in the backyard, winter sunlight pooling gently around my chair, my laptop balanced on my knees. The scene was familiar enough to feel automatic, yet something essential was missing. I could not begin. The ordinary rituals of my working day—emails, brief decisions, the small acts of delegation that usually require no thought at all—felt strangely inaccessible, as though the mechanisms that normally carry me forward had stalled.
This was not because my work had suddenly become demanding. On the contrary, I have spent years arranging my professional life to be as frictionless as possible, so that I am untroubled by the need for sustained intellectual effort. Much of what I do now proceeds by habit rather than concentration. I chose this deliberately: a role that is stable, repetitive, and less intellectually challenging; one that leaves mental space for reading and writing, and allows me to exist, most days, largely on my own terms. For nearly a decade, this arrangement has enabled me to approach my laptop each morning with little resistance, whatever else my life happened to contain.
So the question was not how to work, but why I could not bring myself to start.
The previous day had offered a partial answer. My employer had informed me of a sweeping organisational restructuring: remote work would become the norm, workloads would lighten, deadlines and targets would be relaxed, accountability would be lowered. The change was framed as a response to impending changes in the labour law to make working conditions in private companies less burdensome for employees, though its effects would be felt immediately. Yet this news alone could not explain my inertia. If anything, the restructuring promised to make my work even less demanding than it already was.
The more consequential shift had taken place earlier that morning, over breakfast and chai, in a long and sober conversation with my husband. We spoke about moving to a smaller city, about buying a house, about the practical and moral weight of caring for ageing family members on both sides. These were not isolated decisions but parts of a single reorientation, a turning of life toward a different centre of gravity.
By the time I sat down to work, it was clear that I was standing at the edge of a threshold. Nothing had changed yet. But I could see multiple doors opening at once, each requiring a version of myself I had not fully inhabited before. The routines that had carried me reliably through the past nine years suddenly felt provisional, as though they belonged to a chapter that was quickly drawing to a close.
What surprised me was not the anxiety (I expected that), but the accompanying sense of anticipation. I have always been drawn to moments of transition, to the energy released when the familiar loosens its hold. Upheaval, for me, has often served as permission, for I am the kind of person who likes to harness the momentum of changing life events to provide thrust and justification to ideas long postponed, thoughts kept in reserve for a more suitable moment. That moment, I realised, was upon me. And perhaps the resistance I felt that morning was not reluctance at all, but the mind’s way of pausing before it begins again, differently.
There is a paralysis that arrives not at moments of crisis, but at moments of release. We are well trained to respond to emergency, to scarcity, to pressure. But when the scaffolding of necessity loosens, when deadlines soften, futures widen, and effort is no longer urgently demanded, will itself can falter. What I felt that morning was not exhaustion, but something closer to disorientation: the sudden absence of compulsion.
Modern work culture leaves little vocabulary for such pauses. Hesitation is typically framed as laziness, ungratefulness, or burnout. Yet what I experienced did not resemble fatigue. I was not depleted; I was alert, even quietly exhilarated. What unsettled me was the recognition that the life I had carefully engineered—a life of flexibility, low friction, and self-directed time—was about to demand a different form of responsibility. Freedom, it turns out, can be as exacting as constraint.
Perhaps freedom is not the absence of limits but the assumption of them. Until that morning, several of my limits had been inherited or institutional: office hours, performance metrics, organisational expectations. With those receding, the burden of authorship shifted more fully onto me. What would I choose to do with my days if no external structure insisted that I fill them? What would count as a meaningful expenditure of attention?
This is perhaps why change so often produces a strange backward pull. Standing at the brink of a new phase of life—new city, new house, new obligations—I was confronted not by a single future but by an excess of possible selves. The self who continues working as before. The self who writes more seriously. The self who withdraws, who tends, who anchors. Each was plausible. None yet commanded allegiance.
I had, for years, postponed certain ambitions under the guise of prudence. There would be time later, I told myself—after this phase, after these obligations, after life settled into something more predictable. But predictability, I was learning, is not something life eventually delivers. It is something we temporarily borrow, often mistaking it for permanence. The resistance I felt that morning was not to work itself, but to the recognition that the conditions I had been waiting for were already here.
If this moment of resistance meant anything beyond my own private unease, it was a reminder that work has always done more than organise income. It has organised time, identity, and moral seriousness. Max Weber argued that the discipline of work once supplied an ethical framework, a way of making one’s life intelligible to oneself. Even as the religious underpinnings of that framework eroded, its temporal structure remained: the working day, the working week, the sense that effort itself conferred legitimacy on one’s existence.
What happens, then, when work no longer insists so loudly on being done?
A great deal of contemporary work is designed to be endlessly repeatable, requiring neither presence nor conviction. This has its advantages, particularly for women, caregivers, and those whose lives do not conform to a linear arc of professional ambition. But increasingly, it promises autonomy without fully preparing us for its consequences. Flexibility, remote work, softened targets, asynchronous hours are all presented as unambiguous goods. And in many ways they are. But they also withdraw something that older forms of labour supplied by default: an external reason to begin. When work ceases to demand our presence, the burden of justification shifts inward. When work no longer organises life around necessity, it must be justified on other grounds: meaning, purpose, or at least coherence. Without these, even the most comfortable routine can begin to feel spectral.
This is not burnout, nor alienation in the classic sense. It is something subtler: a thinning of necessity. Many modern jobs persist not because they are needed, but because they maintain the appearance of busyness. Yet even when work is real, competent, and humane, it can still lose its existential gravity. Habit continues, but meaning becomes negotiable.
Philosophers have long warned that freedom is not experienced as relief but as weight. To be uncoerced is to be responsible not only for action but for direction. The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard described anxiety as “the dizziness of freedom.” It is the sensation that arises when one realises that one can choose differently. Not must, but can. That morning, sitting under the winter sun, laptop closed, I felt that dizziness acutely.
Thresholds interrupt the drifting of our minds. They force the question that routine postpones: what is this labour in service of now? Not in some abstract, aspirational sense, but in the concrete conditions of a life that is changing geographically, temporally or morally. To feel resistance at such moments may be less a failure of motivation than an insistence on coherence. In refusing to begin my workday as usual, my mind was staging a small rebellion, against unconscious continuation. It was insisting, gently but firmly, that before proceeding, I must decide what, now, counts as forward.
I did eventually open my laptop that day. The emails were answered, the small decisions made. Nothing dramatic followed. And yet the interruption mattered. It marked the end of a period in which work could be treated as neutral infrastructure, humming reliably beneath the rest of life. What comes next will likely involve work of some kind (it almost always does), but no longer on autopilot.
Perhaps this is the challenge of contemporary labour: not to escape work altogether, but to relearn how to consent to it. To allow pauses when structures shift, and to treat hesitation not as something to be conquered, but as a form of thinking. Admittedly, such interruptions may be the only moments when work is finally forced to explain itself.
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