Do you ever feel that you’ve done “enough” work for a lifetime?

What I am driving at is that I’ve produced an extraordinary amount of writing for work over the past two decades. Enough to fill a book or two, I think:

- Thousands of long-form help docs and troubleshooting articles.

- Hundreds of thousands of thoughtful, considered emails sent to customers, each addressing a unique problem or piece of feedback.

- Entire sections of employee handbooks—hiring, onboarding, training, security, support, and so on.

- Hundreds of product pitches, briefs, specs, and countless iterations to product and marketing copy.

- And more team, business, and feature launch updates than I can remember.

Almost all of this work is still used in one way or another today. And it’s not shoddy work, it’s good stuff. I took pride in writing, self-editing, and presentation. In the long run none of it will matter, but the process of creating the work mattered to me at the time.

I would imagine that many of you are in the same boat—your years have been feverishly productive. That is something to be proud of, right? And yet I find it so difficult to let go of the (artificial) urge to continue to create, to continue to produce, if only because that’s what we are "supposed" to be doing.

I’ve written so much to and for other people that I no longer have the desire to write anything for myself or the people in my life. Does anyone else want to put down the pen for a few years? I think most of us, as purposeful knowledge workers, have produced more content, more work, than our grandparents could have ever needed or wanted to produce throughout their lives.

Surely we have sent enough emails, reviewed enough pull requests, and written enough documentation for a lifetime? I don't mean to imply that I want to stop working. I'm not sure what I am grasping at here.