I realize a common trait in people that appear successful is their unending workload. However, that ‘workload’ is not literally work at all. It is just their means of coping with the world and finding their place within it, both important means of survival. Where other people look at Louis Kahn’s life and see the exhaustive stress, the sleepless nights, and the lack of family relations — he absolutely could not and did not see it this way. There is no stress to his unending design charrettes. In his mind, there were no seemingly, big consequences for not making his deadlines. He didn’t even choose to live in the same world everyone else lives in and I find it hard to believe that it was even a choice. It was just his way of living and he didn’t give a second thought to it.

That is why I am writing tonight after working an 8 hour day, going to a networking event at the Clifford Still Museum, cooking dinner, writing a scholarship proposal, researching a summer internship, and emailing a few friends. I wanted to quit. I opened a beer, ate some popcorn, and wanted to whine. But this does not make me better. This does not build up a life that I want to live. I am choosing right now, and by Louis Kahn’s example, to pick up my computer again and finish this piece in which I had only written 50 words before this moment. I would think in normative terms that this would be considered unhealthy.

Why are you still pushing on and killing yourself for something so unnecessary?

I tell you why.

It makes life worth living to me.

It helps me fulfill my purpose,

something I daily turn over in my head.

My stress comes from worrying about a life in which I did not master a continually evolving purpose. I must build it up and carry it out to an exhausting degree of realization.

I haven’t figured out a way to block out the part where I want to be exhausted and train myself to think of it as something I need to do.

From exhaustive to normative, tell me the secret Lou.

Yale University Art Gallery

Exeter Academy Library