Your Job, Your Work, Is Not Your Life

Part of a "Software Engineering Enchiridion"

Sep 08, 2025

(Figure: Camilla’s Bookshop, one of my favourite places to get away from the computer screen)

Epictetus said you are an actor in a play. You don’t pick the script. You don’t write the part. You only play it well. That’s the deal.

“Remember that you are an actor in a play, which the playwright chooses: if long, then in a long one; if short, then in a short one. If he wishes you to play the part of a beggar, see that you act it well, and so if of a cripple, of a ruler, or of a private person. For this is your business—to act well the given part, but to choose it belongs to another.” — Epictetus

Developing software is a good role. Creative. Demanding. Sometimes beautiful. But it’s still a role. You are not your job title. You are not your Jira tickets. You are not the graveyard of pull requests that never got merged.

The trouble starts when you forget this. When you wear “developer” like a second skin. You start thinking every late-night deploy is proof of your worth. Every bug is an attack on your soul. Every layoff is a death in the family. That’s when the job owns you.

The truth? Work doesn’t love you back. It doesn’t care if you stay late, burn out, or dream in YAML. Companies pivot. Projects die. Managers move on. And if you’ve made your job your identity, then when it vanishes, so do you.

So, don’t. Play the role with skill, but keep your self somewhere the job can’t reach. Do your job with presence, with pride, with craft. Then close the laptop and step into the real script: the messy, glorious, beautiful and unpredictable play that is your life.

Spend time with people who don’t know what Kubernetes is and don’t give a damn. Cook a meal that takes longer than a sprint planning session. Go outside and let the sun blind you after hours of dark mode. Read something with no diagrams. Love someone who couldn’t care less about your latest commit.

That’s the paradox: when you stop making your job your whole life, you actually get better at it. You’re fresher. You’re sharper. You’re less brittle when things break—because they always do. A bug is just a bug, not a personal apocalypse.

Work is what you do. It is not who you are. Don’t confuse the two. You’re more than your commits. And if you aren’t yet, maybe it’s time to become so.

Your Job, Your Work, Is Not Your Life.

The Maxim

Aphorism

Work is what you do; it is not who you are.

Rationale

Confuse the two, and you’ll get wrecked. Your job is a role in someone else’s play. It can be fun, noble, even important. But it is not you. Lose the job and you’ll still be here, though shakier if you’ve welded your identity to a Jira board. A role is temporary. A life is not.

Practices

Set some boundaries. The screen will always want you; it has infinite hunger. You do not.

Close the laptop at a reasonable hour. Pick up a guitar. Walk your dog. Cook something that makes your house smell alive.

Tell people, “I work as a developer,” not, “I am a developer.” The first is a fact. The second is a trap.

Pitfalls

Beware the cult of hustle. Hero coding feels like glory, until you realise it’s unpaid overtime in clown makeup.

Don’t chain your self-worth to commits or GitHub stars—that’s like measuring love by Instagram likes. And don’t fall for the myth of irreplaceability. You are replaceable. We all are. Accept that, and you’re freer, lighter, sharper.

Checklists

Did you spend time this week doing something that has nothing to do with tech?
If you lost your job tomorrow, would you still know who you are?
Are you present with family or friends without Slack buzzing in your pocket?
Do you take pride in learning itself or only in shipping features?

Examples

There’s the dev who coded weekends for years. Thought he was building a cathedral. The company pivoted, bulldozed the product, and left him with ashes and RSI.

Then there’s the engineer who paints watercolours, hikes on Sundays, plays bass in a garage band. He comes back to code fresh and dangerous, the kind of brain you want in a crisis. Or the senior dev who has changed jobs three times but keeps being a reader, a parent, a mentor. She doesn’t break when the org chart shifts. She bends, then carries on.