> We take up professions to sustain life — but poetry, beauty, romance and love are what we stay alive for.
John Keating says it in Dead Poets Society, and it holds up as literal architecture.
The code you write, the product you build, the work you do — it keeps the lights on in the room where the living actually happens.
Work buys the evening. It funds friendship, love, poems, music, books. Someone's hand. A longer conversation. A quieter you. That's the room.
The failure was never having a job — it's forgetting what the job was for, and letting the scaffolding become the building.
And then the rare luck: when the thing that pays is also a thing you'd stay alive for. That overlap is a beautiful place to be, and it stays luck rather than a plan.
Build the scaffolding. Then go inside.