I learned these lessons the hard way.
I have, through my life, oscillated from one extreme to the other - at school, this manifested as an utter indifference to lessons, preferring to read under the desk, yet a week of frantic learning in which I would absorb the year or term’s lessons. I was mostly time drunk at this point.
Come graduation, I had an urgent need for income, to support both myself and family members who suddenly found themselves in a hard place. I worked a day job, a night job, two side gigs, and burned the candle fiercely for four years.
One of the side gigs grew, became a business. Ten more years of utterly relentless and increasingly miserable grind. Lucre, too, but at a steep cost.
2016. Burned out. Health so bad I earnestly thought I would probably soon die. Quit.
Three years of time drunkenness. Travel. Drugs. More travel. More drugs. Lots of time staring into space and wondering who I was. Nothing was fulfilling, even doing things I knew I once dreamt of one day doing - the memory of desire was there, but the actuality, absent. I had utterly internalised the idea that my labour was my identity, and that I was without want or need. It seemed intractable, and no amount of r&r found me any improved.
Then, we moved off grid. Seemingly the last step in a spiral, instead found me suddenly very much occupied with the basics of modern life. Water. Power. Shelter. Floods. Fires. You name it.
That, and therapy, have finally found me at a virtuous mean. My cycles are no longer decadal, but hourly. I work. I play. I learn. I waste time. I use it well.
I find myself with a child now, to boot - and she is the virtuous mean embodied - work and play, all in one.
Anyway. These lessons are easily spoken, but hard earned.