I was recently asked how I found work that I really enjoyed doing, that I was super passionate about.

And my answer quite plainly was: I forced myself to never think of work as a job. Even with money as a practical necessity, I always tried to shake off this notion of just getting a "job". I do want to say that, conscious of my protected and stable upbringing when compared to other parts of the world, this might fail to capture important nuances and might be more aimed towards the people who share this privilege with me. However, I do hope that regardless of your upbringing and background you can find some value in this.

We often forget that jobs were not created for us to have jobs; jobs just kind of came into existence because there was shit to get done and problems to be solved. And along the way of solving it, you got compensated for your effort. Not for the sake of having the job in the first place - that was a nice side effect.

But I feel like we don't see work like that anymore. We work for the sake of working, not for the sake of solving the problem that work was necessary for in the first place. Work is not a means to an end anymore; it is the end.

So how did I find something to actually work on? I simply cared.

I cared enough about a set of problems that I wanted to do something about them.

As a teenager, I was kind of depressed by all the problems people were talking about constantly. Climate change, poverty, all of that stuff. But while we were constantly confronted with these problems, rarely did the conversation focus around actually doing something about them. People learned to care about the problems, but not about the solution. That really bummed me out because how can you ever be optimistic about life if no one's doing something about the things you're worried about in the first place?

The problem is that most of us grew up being told that we can't care because we don't have the right ideas or agency to care. But we do. Most of the stuff around you was thought of by people with brains not that different from yours. Your ideas matter, if you just make them worth caring about.

So even though there is all this shit we are facing, there still is something worth living for in spite of that. There is something to care about. Life is worth caring about, and making sure life gets better.

So what I did is essentially decide that the best way out of this nihilism is to find my set of problems I deeply cared about and the solutions I wanted to see exist, push forward, and rally behind, which I did and now still do.

So if you struggle finding meaning in your work or something to do in the first place, look for something which makes life worth caring about. Things that you deeply care about. What problems move you? What do you want to get better at? Find a set of topics or people or things you deeply care about, you want to be better at, you want to help solve.

And then find the work that would be required to protect them from the problems threatening them, things required to come closer to a solution for these problems. And then just do it. That's work. And the job title or the position is just something secondary to that that emerges from that.

Care, and something to get done will follow.

Care, and work and a job and resources will follow.

When I said that "care and something to get done will follow" I really meant it. But I did leave out a little nuance. Actually getting things done is absolutely, insanely notoriously difficult. Let me explain why:

Let's imagine you found something you want to work on, so your next thought likely is "What is the next step I can do now so that I can actually start to work on this set of things I care about?"

Now here is where things get hard. Let's go back a year in time: Last year I realised that from the moment when I first found the things I wanted to work on, to the present day, some five years later, I didn't feel a single step closer to a solution than I was when I first started imagining it. I thought, hmmm that's weird, since I had been literally thinking 24/7 nonstop about this set of problems from the moment I started caring.

What I slowly realised is, that my thinking or what better should be called my ruminating, had been an awfully convenient excuse for me to feel like I was DOING something. But the difference between thinking and ruminating is that rumination only ever gets you closer to another thought, never an action.

It was a really good excuse for feeling productive but not actually being productive. There was nothing tangible "produced" out of my thinking. But I had this feeling that if I just sat on a problem for long enough, the perfect solution would just pop out of my head.

I was looking for a single elegant, sexy solution to a set of complex, dynamical problems.

Life doesn't consist out of sexy solutions. What life actually is, is a series of duct taped solution along the way to the sexy one. One cannot simply skip to the 101st step when not even having taking the first one. It is very difficult to predict life that accurately in your head, no matter how hard you try. Trust me, I really did not want to face this, but don't let rumination trick you. Thinking is sexy, doing things will always be messy.

Essentially, I was stuck in a never-ending incubation process of the perfect idea.

But compound action and iteration beats perfectionism every single time. Because the one incentives you to do something, while the other will only ever tell you that you or the world are not ready, qualified, or smart enough... quite yet. If you want the things you care about to turn into reality, then there's no way around engaging with reality.

The irony is that while all of this was happening, I happened to get an actual external opportunity to work on some of the things I care about. Dembrane, a company I had reached out to some time ago, responded and gave me the chance to work with them on building tools to aid participation in democracy. Being persistent with passion worked out that time.

However, it was awfully hard to commit to it - to say yes. Because it was scary. It was outside my comfort zone. And because I realised that every time things got a tiny bit inconvenient, like in this case, I tended to return right to my thoughts - ruminating about life rather than living it.

I was so scared to "fail" or not be perfect in my pursuit of solving the problems I care about, that I refused to actually just do something to get there.

I was letting my ego get in the way of committing to my work, actually putting the process of solving the problems first, not the need for elegant solutions I can identify myself with.

So I said yes to the job. And also yes to all the scary stuff - Me being faced with the awful reality that my actual tangible day-to-day skillset mismatched massively with the perceived quality of all these thoughts I had had about myself.

It turns out however, that dealing with this scary stuff is easier once it's actually real and not just the result of an excessive train of thought about what it could have been. Remember - you can't predict reality that well.

So in confrontation with my scarcity of action and abundance of thought, I grew, learned, failed - but I was DOING all of that - and finally not just thinking about it.

Now, a general rule of thumb for my life has become to think one less thought per day, and as plainly put by a very good friend of mine: "whenever you are thinking, do something instead."

So once you find these things to care about, don't let your thoughts stop you from getting things done. If you are like me, they will always have something to criticise either way.