Because 2 days is never enough.

On the train to Philly this weekend, I was binging on old This American Life episodes and I came across a favorite, “Meet the Pros” (#192). This episode profiles various amateurs coming face to face with the professionals they admire. The whole episode is great, but of particular interest to me is the David Rakoff piece, which also appears in a slightly altered form in his hilarious book, Don’t Get Too Comfortable.

Rakoff is a passionate maker (”my salvation lies in time spent alone with an x-acto knife and commercial grade adhesive”) and he makes a pilgrimage to his own personal Mecca: the crafts department at Martha Stewart Living. He is driven by a question that’s been lurking in my mind for several years, but has been getting louder as I have become a-no-doubt-about-it grown up. Rakoff describes the blissful state he enters when making stuff. This state, called flow, was proposed by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to describe the optimal human mental state that includes a loss of self-consciousness, deep concentration, a distortion of time, and sense of intrinsic reward. Rakoff asks

Is it possible for one’s job to be an exercise in having that feeling or does the act of doing something for money automatically rob you of that feeling?

At Martha Stewart, Rakoff is in awe. My favorite moment is when he squeals to the Crafts Editor, upon seeing her desk “You’re the luckiest person I ever met” and proceeds to describe what he calls “an embarrassment of craft supplies.”

But in the end, among these RISDI hipsters he finds at Martha’s, he learns that, for him at least, going from avocation to vocation just isn’t the same:

Dream over, I can’t work here. I just don’t want to expend that kind of effort to get to a place that I can get to without any work at all. Under that kind of pressure, I’m not even sure I could get there at all. To paraphrase the old saying, ‘don’t flow where you pro.’

The rest of the segment, in which David tracks down friends who have received his wares in the past, is truly hilarious. I highly recommend listening or checking out his book.

I’m still left wondering, though, should I have pursued a more creative career. I care about what I do and I actively chose it for a reason, but I wonder if I’d be more happy spending my workdays doing things I love: cooking, writing, reading, designing, making, traveling. What would that look like? And would I actually like it?