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This places the issue squarely before us. "Need" is the idol before which human sacrifices are required. The cult of need is prevalent and ascendent, Need should not be a blank check on other people's lives, but a demand for individual responsibility. Since needs are inifinite, the moment you make your needs someone else's responsibility is the moment of compulsory human sacrifice. dream_weaver said: "Is government the antithesis or the procurer of freedom?" If only protecting freedom was the sole role of government.... Government has metastasized to become largely an abuser of our freedoms.

No; but this will continue to go in circles unless we agree that force is a key factor.

I'm pretty sure I know exactly what you're talking about, OP. I feel the same thing. Not to the degree you do, but what I read from you is familiar to me. I've searched and formulated my own problems with working in much the same way as you. But I've essentialized it further. It seems that in order to attain the values we require, we must also suffer. Suffering and pain are each signals that we are dying. So the essential formulation of this problem is: Life seems to require death. I can think of two problems that are causing this feeling: 1. Your work doesn't serve a good purpose to you, or you have lost sight of the purpose of your work. 2. Your work is torturous work in and of itself. So even if your work is serving purposes for you, the work itself is still killing you. The solution for 1 is to make sure that your work is serving your purposes, and that you don't lose sight of the purpose your work serves. The solution for 2 is fairly obvious: To choose work that doesn't torture you when you perform it. To concretize, I'll show examples from my own life. (Since I don't know anything about yours.) When I first got into my own apartment, I didn't have my computer. My new apartment was in Minnesota and my computer was in Washington. I had nothing to my name and I was going to be getting welfare to sustain myself. (Unemployment for rent. Foodstamps for food.) My computer and my internet are some of the highest values in my life. I really, really needed my computer back. So I really really needed a source of income so I could get my computer back. I normally dread the idea of work, and I would have been tempted to stay on the doll. But because I wanted my computer so badly, I applied for work and I got a job as a dishwasher. It didn't feel like torturous work then. It felt like every day I worked was a day closer to having my computer and internet again. I had my sights set on a goal, and my work was not just work; it was what I had to do to attain my goal. Nowadays though, I feel much like you do. Partially because I've lost sight of why I work. It has become a duty that I have to do every day. A duty to get up in the morning and drag myself to work, and to wash dishes, and then go home again. I get my paycheck still, but while I'm at work, I don't mentally associate the work with the money. This breach between the work and the reward in my mind could be one cause of the feeling that work is suffering; that life is death. The other problem is, of course, that the work itself is torturous. There's only so far you can make it on keeping your eyes on the prize. If the work kills you inside, you're still going to start feeling like work is suffering, no matter what rewards you get for your work. You ask what it's like for work to be life rather than to be pain? Here's another example, again from my personal life. I'm a self-taught web programmer who codes in php. Back in the day, when I used to actively code, I would code because I had amazing ideas that I wanted to bring to life. Ideas that I daydreamed about and then eventually set about coding. Once I started coding, I couldn't stop. The only thing on my mind was the idea that I was bringing to life. I was unable to resist, because the idea I was creating was so important to me that it was an end in itself to me. I would work 8+ hours a day, in my own free time, perfecting my code, so the entire program perfectly revolved around my idea for it. This is work that feels like life, as opposed to work that feels like death. Think back to your past. Have you ever performed a productive hobby where you enjoyed the thing you were doing, as if it were an end in itself? That is what Ayn Rand means when she says that work is life. So as far as I can tell, your answer is two-fold. 1. Find work that serves your purposes and never lose sight of the connection between your work and your purposes. And, 2. Find work that is an end in itself to you. Work that you can't resist doing. This way, you can serve the other purposes in your life with work that feels like life as well. You should be able to truly live if you can do these two things.