“It matters to me that the thing I do for work is the least interesting thing about me.”

(*insert flabbergasted face*)

A friend said this to me recently, and I knew she knew a thing or two about letting work play the dominant role in her life.

She had lived a one-dimensional life for decades as an entrepreneur—prioritizing work at the expense of friendships/ health/ love/ leisure/ personal growth/ spirituality/ reading trashy books on beach vacations.

After diagnosing herself with this “work has engulfed the entirety of my life” affliction, she vowed to add more dimension into her existence. She morphed her career to fit into a full and rich life that was worth living—like joining a not-for-profit board, learning how to play the drums, and playing gigs with an impossibly cool girl band on the weekends. (Suffice to say her work is definitely not the most interesting thing about her now. Anyone who can play a percussion instrument to a Paramore song is kind of The World’s Most Interesting Woman.)

“I don’t cancel plans to do work anymore” she said with pride. (*insert further flabbergastation*)

I bet he doesn’t play the drums.

Signs and symptoms that you might be living a one-dimensional life:

• If you are finding yourself interested in this article, based on the title and the cute little drawing I did (it is cute, isn’t it?), you are busted.
• If you describe your life as flat, narrow, or lacking in variety, depth, or meaning, you might be living a one-dimensional life. (You’re not the only one making this ohhhh shit face right now: 🙄.)
• If you wince at the expression “live to work vs. work to live” because you know you’ve been doing the former and not-so-much the latter, you’re likely a candidate for one-dimension-hood.
• If you turn slightly to the side and look in the mirror, and you notice you’re actually a cardboard cutout of a person, there is a very high likelihood you’re living one-dimensional life.
• If you’ve been longing for “more” in life—more fun/ more connection/ more Vinho Verde (oops, silly me and my typos)/ more learning/ more adventure/ more romance/ more memories-in-the-making… you might be a greedy bitch. Just kidding! You might be one-dimensional.
• If you are consciously aware you’re overly focused on one part of life and unsure how to/ afraid to add more life into your life, because it might mess with the one thing that’s Most Important right now, you already know you are one-dimensional and you didn’t need this diagnostic tool. But it helps to have a second opinion, I know.
• If you have been typing out pages upon pages that read, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” and you’re perfectly okay with that, you might be leading a one-dimensional life (with a lot of red rum in your future):

Eeeeerily one-dimensional.

• If your partner (who may or may not look a lot like Shelley Duvall) looks at you or your work like this, you might be 1D:

Oh Shelley. You’d better run.

• If you make this face in response to your partner, Shelley’s, look of horror, it’s a telltale sign that you are living a one-dimensional life. Also maybe that you are going to axe your family super-soon:

“You can’t handle the truth” of being 1D.

• The Shining Sidebar is now over.

A one-dimensional life is a life lived on autopilot. It’s predictable, routine, and myopically confined to a single role, goal, or identity … often at the expense of good things like curiosity, connection, personal growth, _____________ 👈you fill in the blanks with whatever a good life consists of that you’re leaving behind.

For moderate to severe cases of living a one-dimensional life…

Here are a few snippets from people I know who are reconfiguring their lives from one-dimensional to three-dimensional:

• Writer Stephanie Vozza shared in a recent blog past, “I was always working … because I didn’t have anything else to do. And I didn’t have anything else to do … because (you guessed it) I was always working. It was a Catch 22. A vicious circle.” … “Honestly, if I hadn’t lost someone important to me, I’d probably still be bringing my laptop to the pool … But you don’t need a tragedy to wake you up and push you off the hamster wheel. You just need to decide to do more. Be more. Live more.”
• I reached out to the guy who helps me fix my intermittent website glitches. Here was his email back: “I’ve found that I really don’t have time to be of assistance and still have a personal life.” I was so excited by the stand he was taking to prioritize his three-dimensional life that I barely noticed I was being fired as a client. (Anyone know of a good WordPress freelancer?!)
• Scottie Scheffler recently had these deliciously diminishing things to say about his status as the number one golfer on the planet right now: “I love being able to play this game for a living. But does it fill the deepest wants and desires of my heart? Absolutely not… This is not the be-all and end-all; this is not the most important thing in my life.”
• My friend Marie used to work for a ginormous global coffee company, and after years of doing fulfilling, great work, she had a (caffeine-infused?) epiphany that sounded like: “If I die having just worked with hot brown liquid my whole career…” She wanted more. She created a cool company that added dimension to her life (a company that just had the leaders sign a “Founders’ Flourishing Commitment” which includes gems like, “We will not celebrate overwork or burnout. Instead, we will respect time-off, rest, and boundaries.”
• My friend Meg has the best email autoreply of all time. Beginning with the subject line of, “Heads up! I’m observing a slow summer,” the body of the email response reveals that, “I’m currently observing a slow summer – honoring the commitments I’ve made, but also taking some time to quiet my pace and prioritize time outdoors and being present with loved ones. I’m here, and you can consider your message received – and I’ll reply as soon as I’m able.” On a recent chat she shared that she was treating this summer like a science project… tightening her boundaries around the yesses and noes with her time. What a deliberate dimension-expanding initiative.

“But what if I love my work so much and it makes me feel astonishingly alive?”

Hip hip hooray for your amazing gig, Worker Bee! If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Keep on working on until the sizzle fizzles/ you get crispy-fried-burned-out/ your partner asks for a divorce “for real this time”/ you die at your desk (the “work to death” phenomenon known as karoshi in Japan).

Jesting aside, I think some of us are wired to love work, and work loves us back. We might be inclined to live a bit of a 1D life that revolves around work and still die happy. Or we go through phases where we’re mono-focused on a particular domain of life—like our education, or our budding careers, or the infatuating days of courting a mate (is it the 1800s? Did I just say, “courting a mate”?), or raising a family, or getting absorbed in a hobby. It’s possible to be perfectly content in our one-dimensionality, right? We just owe it to ourselves to come up for air every now and then and ask ourselves, in the harsh daylight, if we’re truly fulfilled or if maybe we’re selling ourselves a bit short on the other things life has to offer. (I’ll let you untangle that one with your therapist.)

I love my work and don’t mind working on weekends or while on vacation. I don’t need or want this to change too much, because speaking and writing and drawing make me breathlessly happy. Case closed, right? Yet … if I’m being honest … I see how I might be missing out on some “extra-curricular activities” that could add to my experience of being alive in my remaining 1,746 Mondays. If I shut my laptop and went to a cooking class, for example, I think—no, I know—I’d feel more astonishingly alive. I might write one less article that week, but at least I’d know how to make chicken piccata. I need to plan what to do to fill my time so I have a reason to not keep filling it with work. Do you know what I mean?

So what’s the right amount of dimension for you? Living 1D might be leaving a lot of life-living potential on the table. Is 2D right? Can 3D fit?

Sorry, there will not be a Q and A session about this 10D hypercube today.

Nerdy sidebar: did you know there is such a thing as a ten-dimensional hypercube? I shit you not! It has 1024 vertices, 5120 edges, 11520 square faces, 15360 cubic cells, 13440 tesseract 4-faces, 8064 5-cube 5-faces, 3360 6-cube 6-faces, 960 7-cube 7-faces, 180 8-cube 8-faces, and 20 9-cube 9-faces.

Living in 10D sounds exhausting.

The goal isn’t to overwhelm—it’s to diversify the domains of our lives, to add depth and width and contrast and color and texture and mesmerizing geometric shapes to make this experience of being alive feel just that—alive. Definitely not cardboard-flat. And definitely not a 10D hypercube. Maybe 3D sounds just right.