The blue light from the screen painted my face with its familiar glow. Another Friday night, another session. My fingers, almost independently, navigated the menu, selecting the same game, joining the same server. I’d told myself this afternoon, after a particularly draining week, that I’d finally crack open that book I’d bought, the one about forgotten culinary traditions. Yet here I was, not out of explicit desire, but out of… momentum. A tiny, almost imperceptible whisper in the back of my mind asked, ‘Is this what I *want* to do, or is this just what I *do*?’ The distinction felt like a thin sheet of glass, barely there, but profoundly important if you bothered to tap it.
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I remember a conversation with Marie D.-S., an incredibly talented food stylist I once worked with on a campaign. She had this knack for making even the simplest dish look like a masterpiece, arranging edible flowers with the precision of a surgeon, finding just the right angle for the light to hit a perfectly seared scallop. Marie’s passion for food was palpable; she’d talk for 22 minutes straight about the perfect caramelization process or the nuanced texture of a sous-vide vegetable. But then, one day, over a cup of tea – ironically, served in a mug that looked like it had been styled for a magazine spread – she confided something unexpected. Her job, which started as an all-consuming hobby, had begun to
