‘Living death’ was my dad’s nickname for office work. Now I’m in my 40s — and I can see why.

A trip to Algeria for her 40th birthday inspired the author to adjust her career path. 

I was chest-deep in bathwater, listening to the sound of soapy foam popping. I’d timed the moment so that when the clock struck midnight — and I turned 40 — I’d be soaking in a bubble bath on the coast of Algeria. I needed an elegant backdrop as I stared my future in the face.

I’d splurged on a single night in a sprawling hilltop estate with arches and colorful tiles.

Palms rustled outside my window, and lights twinkled over the Bay of Algiers. The hotel had been constructed in a Moorish revival style at the end of the 19th century. I was used to more spartan sleeping arrangements, having spent much of my 30s as a freelance journalist.

For the past several years, I’d been working a desk job and on autopilot. It started at some point during those mushy, airless pandemic years. A therapist would pinpoint my numbness to when my dad’s heart suddenly stopped, in 2020.

Dealing with grief while working a desk job

In those Covid-averse days, nobody wanted to gather in groups, least of all to embrace tearful, snotty mourners. So, we never had a funeral.

I flew to California, where my dad spent his final years, and gathered with my brothers, hoping to do something symbolic, like stack stones at the beach or scream into the surf. But a Trump rally was whooping through town that day, and the sky glimmered apocalyptic-orange from wildfires. We renounced our imagined grieving rituals. Eating fish tacos in a socially distanced circle would have to suffice.

But malaise had already crept in before that staggering loss. Life had grown predictable and soft, thickening around the middle like an aging waistline.

Overwork had something to do with it. I’d spent carefree years bouncing around Kyrgyzstan and Lebanon, Sri Lanka and Mexico, India and Armenia. Then in my mid-30s, I wandered into a full-time desk job.

“Living death,” that’s how my philosopher-slash-guitarist father had nicknamed office work. No surprises. Every day felt the same. The role itself — designing photo exhibits and documenting peace initiatives — was often fascinating, and I welcomed the reprieve from financial precarity.

But sitting under fluorescent lights all day made me feel like a caged panther. Or maybe a cyborg. I wasn’t prepared for corporate culture.

Months in, a colleague’s mother died. “Condolences,” I wrote as the subject line of an Outlook email, though I wanted to shatter our cubicle decorum and howl in vicarious despair.

Then, my own dad died, and the colleague simply hit reply and added her own message of sympathy. How bleak our bloodless exchange felt. Was this how I’d spend the rest of my life, marking traumatic milestones with Microsoft Office notifications?

Grief was overwhelming, but productivity required putting on a happy face at work. I soldiered ahead joylessly. Firing off four dozen emails a day became a grim escape — a way not to think, a way to cushion myself from new experiences, and thus further loss. To no one’s surprise, burnout followed.

Author’s view from hotel overlooking the Bay of Algiers 

A freelance job helped me feel free again

I needed to start living again. That meant salvaging parts of myself I’d jettisoned on my race to adulthood, including the itinerant writer in me. When a magazine offered me an assignment in Algeria, I jumped at the chance. This would be my first solo reporting trip in four years.

Could I still navigate unfamiliar cities alone or cold-call strangers? Luckily, after a few days in Oran and Algiers, muscle memory took over.

In the name of research, I started hitting up red-lit clubs, where cabaret singers warbled risqué Arabic lyrics to crowds sloppy with whisky. One night, around 2 a.m., I squinted through threads of smoke at the man crooning into a mic, ears ringing violently, and thought: “This is exactly where I want to be.”

On the eve of my landmark birthday, contemplating my feet splayed over the tiled tub in my hotel suite, I thought about how rai singers — a form of Algerian folk music — were paragons of living boldly. Rai singers had even been assassinated for making music.

I make no comparison between their incredible courage and my own infinitely milder risks, which soon included drifting back to freelance work. But when you consider women of earlier generations, whose lives were narrowly circumscribed between marriage and motherhood, the idea of living by one’s own wits starts to feel pretty radical.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting a more conventional path or a less messy career. But on the cusp of midlife, what I still craved was the thrill of a blank page.