Have our jobs become prisons from which we don’t want to escape? The Economist’s Ryan Avent offers neither prescription nor condemnation in this meditation on the downside of doing work you love: “My work – the work we lucky few well-paid professionals do every day, as we co-operate with talented people while solving complex, interesting problems – is fun. And I find that I can devote surprising quantities of time to it. … What is less clear to me, and to so many of my peers, is whether we should do so much of it. … It follows us home on our smartphones, tugging at us during an evening out or in the middle of our children’s bedtime routines. It makes permanent use of valuable cognitive space, and chooses odd hours to pace through our thoughts, shoving aside whatever might have been there before. It colonises our personal relationships and uses them for its own ends. It becomes our lives if we are not careful. It becomes us.” Read “Why do we work so hard?” in The Economist’s 1843 magazine