I get into work around 5:30am each morning. My walk into the office from the parking garage is an easy five minute stroll across two city blocks. It’s down a steep hill, meaning I get a pretty awesome view of the San Francisco Bay and the city itself from this walk. At that time in the morning, the street is deserted. The sun hasn’t risen yet. The streetlights glow a lonely green to empty intersections. It’s usually crisp at this early hour of the morning, with birds chirping and flittering among the eucalyptus trees along the road. Once in a while, the mad cries of homeless person cut hauntingly through the silence. On good days I can smell the salt air of the ocean brought in with the fog. Some mornings I can see the glittering towers of San Francisco and the bridges twinkling with light.

I think about all sorts of things on this walk. I’m glad for this moment of brief physical activity between sitting in my truck and the office. The walk runs right next to the huge concrete structure we’re building, rising high into the sky now, and that view alone fuels my thoughts. I suddenly find solutions and possibilities to problems that dogged me from the day before. Just seeing the height of that 400k square foot structure, the floor level is now in the teens, gives me a tangible sense accomplishment.

Some mornings I purposely avoid thinking about work, and I pretend I’m a traveler experiencing the Bay Area for the first time. I try to be mindful and see everything on this walk new and for the first time. I find details on this everyday walk that I hadn’t noticed before: a flowering plant, signs that dot the sidewalks, a certain architectural feature of a building, posters stapled and taped to poles. I try not to blindly walk lost in my thoughts.

Lately, these walks have led me to think about the walk itself.

In the morning, I’m feeling good. A cup of coffee down. My mind is fresh. My heart full of optimism. The whole day is ahead of me ready to be lived. I love being in a city before it wakes up. So on my morning walk, I quite enjoy my job when I reflect on it. I think about how far I’ve come over the course of 20 years working in construction…and where I could go, if I choose to keep working.

Certainly 41 wouldn’t be my peak earning age, right? Each year I work, I add to my labor union pension–and the amount I’ll receive each month after 62. Each year I’m covered with no out of pocket health insurance through the union. Then the most obvious befit of continued work, each year I work I get to plow more money in my index funds. More money means more options. More security.

Anything and everything feels possible on this morning walk. All the problems from the day before seem fixable and benign. And of course, the walk is downhill, I practically glide into work. Each footstep forward bringing forth an inertia, as if the wind was at my back, and there was nowhere else in the world I was meant to be headed towards.

I don’t hate work…not now, at least. On the good days I think I’ll miss work. On the bad days, all I can think about is the day I’ll quit and I find refuge in my portfolio value. My relationship with work is never constant. But it’s improved since I now have a decent sum of money saved up. Funny how money has improved my relationship with work.

Very recently, in the span of a week, I was given a great compliment from a senior executive in the company, with the CEO and other senior executives copied on the email in which the compliment was given. And then two days later, I was chewed out by this same person who is quite far removed from the details of the subject he chewed me out on.

The compliment email made me feel great. It gave me a sense of comfort and security. I thought to myself, man, they like me here. I’ll probably get a good raise and I don’t have to worry about my job. It atoned for the frustrations, stress, commuting time, hard work of my team and just everything that goes with running a fast paced $300 million project. It all felt worth it after receiving praise.

Then the berating from this executive essentially erased any feeling good I got from the praise. It immediately canceled that out and made the compliment worthless to me (and likely any future ones). To be honest, the ass chewing wasn’t directed solely at me, but as the leader on my job, I take my project and how it’s going personally.

Right after that, I was like: Fuck this place. Fuck that executive. Fuck work.

I’ve since calmed down. But the emotional up and down was pretty extreme–how I felt in the span of a week about work. I don’t understand the psychological games this executive might be playing with me, I’m sure it wasn’t intentional. Or maybe I’m reading too much into the words from someone far removed from the action, and taking it too personal.

Either way, this is exactly why I don’t trust work or have the best relationship with it. Work, whether going good or bad, has an extreme connection to my happiness levels. And I don’t like that. I think it has to do with the way I subconsciously tie my identify to my work. If work is going well, I’m doing well. If work is going bad, I’m doing bad. It sucks.

If we stop and just think about what work is, in my case a corporation, it’s a completely made up hierarchy. It’s a fiction we clock into each day, leaving behind the real world and stepping into this place of titles and politics. The money is real, of course, that’s what keeps the place from falling apart, but to think that titles mean something, promotions are life upgrades, the company’s motto’s must be lived out in your actions, is to give a part of yourself up. We all agree to play along in this story for a paycheck, but I won’t get lost in it. I won’t blur the lines between reality and this dream state corporate life. There’s people who care more about this story than the money they receive for participating in it.

Not me. I see through it. My goals are beyond what this made up corporate world can offer me, though the treasures of the corporate world are enticing. They glitter alongside me everyday, so that I feel like Aladdin in the cave of wonders. Here the treasures are titles, raises, power. But I must touch nothing but the lamp, or risk losing myself in this world.

On the way home from work, I make this same walk to the parking garage to leave the office and get to my truck.

This time the walk is uphill, and it’s hot. The sun radiates off the buildings and makes it feel like I’m walking through an oven. My gorgeous view of the bay is gone, and has been replaced by shitty looking apartment buildings. Homeless people fill the streets, cars run red lights at high speeds, the sidewalks are crowded with people, so I must be at complete attention to my surroundings. No day dreaming on this walk.

In the afternoon, around 4pm, I’m tired. I can’t wait to get home and see my wife and kids. There’s nothing exciting about my job. That concrete building of mine I pass by is nothing but problems. I can’t imagine working more than a year more in this grind of a business. My backpack feels heavier. Each step up is a slog. I can’t wait to get to my truck and leave all these problems behind. The life and feel good has been driven out of me by all the problems of work. I know that once I get to my truck, I’ll be sitting in traffic on the freeways, slowly crawling back home.

In a way, it’s an arduous walk back to my truck. My mind is worn down from meeting after meeting, problem after problem. I can’t stop thinking about how much I dislike work, and that I’m so grateful for the money I have saved so that I can quit at an early age. It just feels wrong, this grind. This waking up each morning just to earn money and pay bills, while those higher up the ladder do less and earn more.

This is the scale on which I live. Somehow the two different feelings balance things out so that I’m perfectly aligned. I need the dislike I have for work to fuel my savings goals. Without that arduous afternoon walk back to my truck, what would fuel my need to save so vigorously? What would keep alive my dreams of a life that is more than a five day a week rat race for a pay check? Because I want more than work.

The struggle, as much as I hate it, keeps me going. If it were all downhill and problem free, I’d become a slave to the routine. My life would flash by without me knowing it. The feel good I have in the morning, where I get the inspiration needed to succeed, can actually be a poison if that’s all there was, like the first few drinks of a binge that leaves you hungover and broken.

And maybe that’s the secret: not to eliminate the struggle, but to find meaning in its rhythm. To walk the hill both ways each day—gliding down with hope, grinding up with resolve—and to let that motion remind me that I’m still alive, still choosing, still fighting for something beyond the paycheck. It’s not the job that defines me, but how I move through it. And for now, with each step, I’m sharpening my sword for the life I’m building, not just the one I’m surviving.

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