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How to Stay Happy While Working Long Hours
Four practices for staying happy in the middle of overwork
From late last year through Q1 this year, I worked the most I’ve ever worked at the company. It was inside the context of the application development race in the AI era. The 996 work culture and the talk of SaaS dying because of AI loomed in the background. Inside that gap, I jumped into planning and building the company’s AI products.
When I told my mother on the phone that I was working more than fifty hours a week, she asked who was making me work like that. Mostly people look at me with pity. Inside that gaze, I somehow became a person who had been promised unhappiness, and I thought that if I kept accepting it, I would actually start living that way.
It would be a lie to say the hours of overwork were a purely joyful journey. But because I’m aligned well with the team’s goals, I spent the time willing to contribute. So my situation isn’t pitiful. Still, it wasn’t easy to confidently say I was happy either. While thinking about how to make myself happy while working long hours, I came up with the things I had to do to keep feeling happy in the middle of overwork, and I put them into practice.
The first was exercise. You know that feeling — your head used all the way through, the thoughts running so hard that the headache won’t go away? Part of it is sleep deprivation, but the real problem is the brain staying overheated for too long. Every morning, hating it intensely, I went to the gym to lift heavy things, and at night I kept running. Exercise functions less as stress relief and more as a way to gently regulate the rate at which thoughts and work-energy spike.
The second was tending to my surroundings. If I collapsed into bed the moment I got home, the apartment only got dirtier by the day. Waking up in that state, I would feel that my own life isn’t running properly and that I’m sliding into the pit. It got worse during periods when nothing showed up as visible results at work. Nothing improving anywhere. I needed a small win in the area I could control. Even when I came home at midnight, I cleaned the apartment for thirty minutes before sleeping.
The third was chugumi — the version of myself I want to be. When I can’t use my own discretionary time the way I want, I collapse along with the state of my apartment. The activities that hold up the things I thought I was — favorite hobbies and the like — if I stop doing them, I lose myself. The more it feels that my time isn’t being spent for me, the more the sense of who I am dims. I read books while eating dinner alone at the office, and even when I couldn’t post anything on the blog, I kept scribbling drafts. When I couldn’t do anything else, at least I dug for new dance music on Apple Music and posted what looked good to my Instagram story. These were acts of preserving my self — the self I like, the self that likes reading and writing, the self that listens to good music.
The fourth was the sense of learning something. In a period when I’m pouring massive time into work, output overwhelmingly outweighs input. Rather than filling my head with good references and useful things and then drawing on them to do the work, I more often try things quickly even if they fail and move on. Doing that, the sense of learning anything or growing in skill nearly disappears. Even working enormously hard, I start feeling slack and stalled. I tried writing in my Obsidian daily notes what I had done and what I had learned, and I made a habit of reading articles consciously, organizing them with help from AI, and bookmarking them. It was an act of consciously picking back up the things slipping away and putting them back inside me.
A line I read in Radical Candor gives, I think, very good guidance to overworkers like me (or like anyone else out there).
We have to bring our best self to work. And we have to bring that self back home. This is different from the concept of work-life balance. The balance there means a kind of zero-sum game where attention to life leads to neglect of work, and attention to work leads to neglect of life.
What the author is talking about is not work-life balance but work-life integration. You have to exist as your whole self at the workplace too. The practices above were the act of preserving the self I would bring to the office. The me whose head is running, the me who isn’t filthy, the me who still does what I want to do, the me who is learning something. It was only by bringing that self with me to the company the next day that anything decent came out of work.
What if I had to work at this intensity until retirement? It really wouldn’t be an easy situation, but even so, I want to be happy. I think I have the right to it. I’d like to be the kind of person who can keep doing the necessary actions in any situation and protect their happiness.