THE GOSPEL OF WORK AND SUFFERING
by TM Garret Schmid
January 3, 2026

The other day I sat at my desk and started programming. At some point I looked at the clock and realized I had got carried away. Hours had passed, and somehow I felt I had wasted my day on something unnecessary. I was not writing the code for a customer. I was not doing it for a paycheck. I was doing it for my own system, a project that helps me with my workflow, personally and professionally. But it did not feel like work.

It felt like I had missed out on real life and just sat inside. A little bit like when I was a boy and my mother would tell me to go play outside instead of “playing” on my computer. It was in the late 1980s, and I spent many days and nights hacking myself into games to change the BASIC code, or writing my own code and even whole games. I was fascinated by creating something of my own, like Matthew Broderick in the movie Wargames, one of my favorite movies of the time.

Sometimes I still feel like Broderick when I sit at my desk and get carried away, even though I am building something useful. I am creating infrastructure for my own company and using AI development and local applications for daily tasks, from scheduling, journaling and writing to data retention and organizing my work.

But the emotional verdict in my head does not feel like “good job.” It is more like “you were irresponsible.”

I am a person who never sits with an unanswered question and decided I needed to get to the bottom of this. The main question seemed to be: What is work, or to make it even clearer, what qualifies as work?

The more I thought, the more it revealed a belief system that most people run without noticing: work is only real if you suffer, and if you do not suffer, it is not work. That means if it is not work, it is a waste. And the conclusion is that if you are wasting time, you are failing at life.

A lot of people treat that belief like morality. They treat it like a law of physics. They would never say it out loud in a clean equation, but they live it: work equals suffering. Then, silently, they add the next step: suffering equals meaning. And the only redeemer is retirement. Now you have a whole philosophy of life that sounds noble and is quietly insane.

It is insane because it trains you to mistrust everything that gives you energy. It trains you to treat joy as suspicious. It teaches you that if you feel alive, you must be doing something wrong, because “real life” is supposed to feel like dragging a heavy object uphill until you die. You worked for your whole life for someone else, and as thanks you are broken by the time of retirement.

This is not just an American thing, but America has its own version of it. The version I grew up with had a strong German flavor: Prussian discipline, duty and seriousness. It is the kind of mindset where being tired is proof that you did something valuable, and being rested is proof you did not earn your place. My mother would proudly say that she had raised four kids and that work was her life mission, that she must have done “something right” as if the exhaustion itself was the proof that her life had meaning.

And then there is the childhood layer. Sitting at my Commodore 64 was not called “creating.” It was called playing. The phrase “computering,” a Germanized loan word from English, describes it best. Any computer activity was leisure by default, sitting around lazy, wasting your time. Drawing, writing, learning, programming, all of it was treated like playtime.

So here I am now, decades later, and my brain still sometimes uses the old labels. If I drive Uber for six hours, it counts as work. It feels like I paid a price in time and energy, and I can point to a number afterward. When I set up an LED video wall, there is a paying customer and a price tag attached to the time I spent doing it. Or just now on New Year’s Eve, running a multi camera live production for a customer. Or a renovation job we recently did.

But even this multi-faceted work does not count as work to many people. Even though some are fascinated that “TM always can find gigs,” I have heard it more than once that it is time to find a nine to five job. A real job.

So, if that already does not really qualify as work, then what does sitting at my desk building useful tools qualify for? Back to the beginning. It feels like wasting my time.

Even though these tools will save me hours later, improve my workflow, keep my engineering brain sharp and prepare me for the future, a future that will be saturated with AI and systems thinking whether people like it or not, my brain sometimes tries to call that “wasting time” because it did not come with immediate cash or match the philosophy of the working majority: work means suffering and needs a suffocating structure.

But this Work equals Suffering religion is not really about work. It is about punishment. It is about earning the right to exist. It is about proving to an invisible judge that you are not lazy. It is about living under a moral economy that says your life must cost you something at every moment or you are stealing time from the universe.

So this advice to get a 9-to-5 job is not always bad advice. Some people truly need structure. Some people need predictability. Some people need a container around their nervous system. But the advice is often not practical advice. It is moral advice. It is a command to join the official religion, where suffering is the sacrament.

I have heard that advice in my own life more than often. Not even necessarily with malice, but with the certainty of people who believe they have discovered the only adult way to live. They look at someone who builds systems, does project work, takes gigs, drives Uber, writes, programs, and they interpret it as chaos. They do not see the invisible infrastructure. They do not see that people like me have created their own religion, the right to happiness. They only see that it does not look like their model.

And the irony is that the same people will sometimes admire it. How hard you work. They will be impressed. They will say they do not know how you do it. But when things get tight, or when stress shows up, this admiration can quickly flip into judgment. And then the story becomes: you would not be stressed if you had a “real job.”

The thing is, they may be right. The temporary stress might be gone. But it would be substituted with a job I would probably hate, ending every day with the thought that I am glad it is over and dreading going to work the next day. I would rather choose the absence of this suffering. I chose a life where I take on jobs that will not make me feel dreaded. I choose work that does not feel like work to me by their definition. Maybe deciding that I will choose work that will not make me suffer represents rebellion against this work religion of suffering that I so deeply despise. I decided not to punish myself.

Here is what I found. To me there are several kinds of time, and if you do not separate them, you will keep punishing yourself.

First, there is paid work. This is obvious. Client work. Gigs. Deliverables. The stuff where money arrives because you did something.

Second, there is investment work. This is the work that builds capability. The work that builds infrastructure. The work that does not pay today but changes what you can do tomorrow. It includes learning, writing, training, building a system, building a tool, building a workflow, building a mind.

Third, there is work that suits you in a philosophical, ethical or religious way.

And then there is leisure. True downtime. The kind that might not build anything except recovery. The kind you do simply because you are human and you have the right to be.

The problem is that the Work equals Suffering religion collapses all three into one moral test: did you suffer enough to deserve the right to exist? And if your investment work felt good, it fails the suffering test, and it gets recategorized as leisure. Then leisure becomes guilt. And now you live in a loop where your best work makes you feel like a fraud.

That loop is not a philosophy. It is a trauma pattern wearing a suit. It is an old parent voice or culture voice that never learned to recognize value unless value comes with visible pain.

It marches through your head like the Prussian military and makes you feel like you are not worth existing.

The way out is to redefine work in a way that matches reality. Work is value creation. Sometimes that value is immediate cash. Sometimes it is long term capability. Sometimes it is inner stability that keeps you from collapsing. And sometimes the value is that you are building a life that you actually want to live.​And this is the sentence I keep coming back to: meaning does not require misery. Misery is not proof of virtue.

Some people will still insist that the meaning of life is to grind until you retire. They will call it responsibility. They will call it adulthood. They will call it character. Fine. Keep your religion. But I am not buying into it anymore.​

Because the night I sat at my desk programming was not a wasted night. I was building the infrastructure of my own life. And even if it had been pure leisure, even if it had been a game, I still would have had the right to do it. Not because I earned it through suffering, but because I am a human being.