Were We Born to Work? Reclaiming Your Life Beyond Productivity
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Weekly Dose of Work Recovery Vol. 7.1.26
"The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it."
- Henry David Thoreau
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Were We Born to Work?
Every year around this week, headlines are filled with the same spiel…
Quiet Vacationing Is Costing Employers Millions
Workers Are Mailing It In Before the Fourth
The Hidden Productivity Crisis of Summer Fridays
Every year I have the same reaction: Who hurt these people?
Because once you strip away the panic and outrage bait, "quiet vacationing" usually means something remarkably ordinary.
A client manager closed their laptop at 2:00 on a Friday and drove north to the cabin. An ops exec pushed their mouse every few minutes while watching their kid sprint through a sprinkler with the neighborhood crew. A founder took a long lunch and didn't post about it in Slack.
Those aren't scandals. They're reminders that life keeps happening while email waits.
What catches my attention isn't the behavior. It's the lens through which we keep choosing to see it. Because the conversation almost always begins with the same question:
How much did employers lose?
Rarely do we ask what workers gained…
A precious afternoon with aging parents
A quiet walk to reset with their partner
A baseball game where their kiddo hit an in the park home run
The autopilot we've been running on deserves another look…
Somewhere along the way, we accepted the idea that every hour should justify itself in economic terms. Time became something to optimize. Rest became something to defend. Even joy started needing a business case.
I spent years practicing employment law. I read the policies, negotiated the severance and settlement agreements, and sat across from people who had devoted decades of loyalty to their employer before being invited to a meeting with a title like Quick Check-In.
Watching work wounds happen over and over changes the way I think about loyalty and its inherent one-way feel. It also changes the way I think about an early Friday departure.
So forgive me if I don't lose sleep over someone leaving work to grill hot dogs with their family.
Rest and real life outside of work aren't cracks in the system. They're the reason the system exists in the first place.
Many of us, especially women, learned to organize all the rest of our life around work instead of asking the work we do to support living our best life. Then to really get a gold star in work, we also offered employers our clearest thinking, our strongest energy, and our healthiest years. Whatever remained was reserved for ourselves and the people we loved.
But you weren't born to tend to a calendar invite.
You were born to feel love in your relationships, explore yourself and the world with curiosity, and spend time in community, with enough time, attention, and energy to become more of yourself.
Work has an important place in that story. It simply isn't the whole story.
As we head into this holiday weekend, I hope you reclaim a little of your own life separate from work.
Take the vacation loudly. Close the laptop. Ignore the guilt.
And if anyone needs an explanation, I've drafted a few to help you 😂
The Honest One: I'm out of the office until Monday and intend to stay that way. I'll respond when I return. The hot dogs on the grill require my full attention.
The Boundaried One: Thank you for your message. I'm currently practicing a radical experiment called OOO. If this is truly urgent, someone else will help. If it isn't, I'll happily respond next week.
The Vague One: I'm unavailable due to a previously scheduled commitment to my own wellbeing. Documentation is available upon request (it's a photograph of a lake).
The Generous One: I'm away until July 7. While I'm gone, I hope you find ten quiet minutes to do absolutely nothing. I highly recommend it.
Have a wonderful holiday. The inbox will still be there when you tune back in, refreshed and recharged.
Sincerely,
Bree
P.S. The hardest part of trusting intuition is hearing it in the first place, especially when your logic is talking over it. Breathwork is the most direct way I know to turn the volume down on the mental chatter and reconnect with my most authentic inner truth. If you want to experience that, you can book a session with me here: Book an Intuition + Energy Reset Breathwork
New here? Sign up for the Weekly Dose of WR — and if you love it, share it with a friend!
This week's did you know…
CEO confidence dropped from 59 to 47 in Q2 2026, slipping into negative territory as executive leaders grew more pessimistic about the economy.
While hiring and investment plans remain relatively steady, executives are increasingly concerned about cybersecurity, geopolitics, AI, supply chains, and energy costs. The shift suggests many organizations are preparing for greater uncertainty even before the actual economic data reflects it, showing you that the work stress you feel is not imaginary…
Source: CEO Confidence Score plummets, The Conference Board
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