"This guy was known for loving the job so much that he literally skipped to work... I remember thinking, ‘He had a crush on our job...'"

"'... and he couldn’t not talk about it the way you talk about somebody you have a crush on'... I was like, ‘Maybe this is fine, but it isn’t fun.'" 

Said Liz Glazer, from "A Law Professor Switches to Stand-Up Comedy/Taking an improv class on a whim led to a career in comedy for this onetime law professor" (Wall Street Journal). 

The skipping-to-work guy was a partner in the law firm where she worked before she took up a job as a law professor, but the concept — wanting to really love your job — carried over to law professing, which she left for stand-up comedy. She'd received tenure, but then her school was making buy-out offers, and she snapped it up. She had been doing stand-up performances for a year at that point, and I guess she knew that was her real love.

Do you love your work and if so, does that mean you are in love with your work? There's a difference! Have you ever let go of a successful line of work because you weren't in love with it? Would you? Would you trust that this other thing that you feel you're in love with would really turn out all right? To put it that way makes the problem sound analogous to being married, without any serious problems, but falling in love with someone else. When that happens, do you think well, hell, I want the magic?

No, no... despite the "in love" business, work isn't like marriage. You don't swear lifetime faithfulness to your job, and your job doesn't have a consciousness capable of suffering. You can be untrue to your job. You're just being true to yourself. There's no moral question, only a question of how much to risk your own happiness. The thing you did for love might fail. It might turn out not to feel like so much fun after you've made yourself dependent on it. And you had tenure!!

Maybe this is fine, but it isn’t fun.

"But the troublemakers were as bizarre as they were inescapable... There was the mysterious tent urinator, who found a way to pee on the side of another man’s tent..."

"... every night for six straight weeks (and whose identity is an as-yet uncracked case). The man who always took photos of me changing flat tires to send home to his wife, because 'she was never going to believe that a woman could do this.' The woman who had never ridden a bike before the trip. The daily hitchhiker who 'didn’t do climbs' and thumbed for rides up hills. The racer who wanted everyone else to ride farther and faster each day. The relapsed gambling addict who snuck into town every night and couldn’t be trusted with group funds. The sexual harasser who hounded me daily with lewd comments unfit to print. And in every group, there was always one person who tried to rile up a mutiny because he wanted out of the cooking rotation. It was hard to know who these people were in their daily lives, when they weren’t pushing their bodies to the limit and sleeping on the ground. I had to imagine that the mysterious tent urinator wasn’t similarly taking out his frustrations on a coworker’s office chair. Maybe all that misdirected rage could be chalked up to exhaustion, homesickness, and electrolyte imbalance?"

From "I Loved Bike Touring—Until I Got Paid to Do It/Seduced by the idea of turning my hobby into a paycheck, I led bike tours across the U.S. throughout my twenties. As I learned, some passion pursuits are best left pro bono," by Caitlin Giddings (at Outside). Excellent illustration, by the way.

"The devil has two strategies: the seduction of worldly promises... self-realization, careerism, and worldly success...."

"... and when this fails... there is humiliation, there is rage.... His pride is so great that he enjoys destroying with rage.... May the Lord give us the grace to be able to recognize that spirit that wants to destroy us with fury and when that same spirit wants to console us with worldly appearances, with vanity.... May the Lord give us the grace to discern the path of the Lord, which is the cross, from the path of the world, which is vanity, appearances, window-dressing."

Said the Pope, in Rome, where the coronavirus rages, though this homily seems to speak to people who are enjoying good times — self-realization, careerism, worldly success, vanity, appearances, window-dressing. But that gives it special effect: Those things you used to enjoy were never good for you, and if you are forced to relinquish them, well, you ought to have given them up on your own.

I don't know if the Pope connected these thoughts to the coronavirus, but I note that the word "quarantine" originally referred to the 40 days Jesus spent in the desert tempted by the devil. There was a temptation to worldly success:

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.”

So, when you are in your quarantine, you may long for all the vanity, appearances, window-dressing you have given up. The response from Jesus was:

"Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.'"

"The coronavirus is putting remote work to a gigantic test, and at a totally unprecedented scale."

"Throughout China, Italy, Japan and South Korea, workers have been on lockdown. Last week, the same happened in Seattle. Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Google all told employees there to remain home.... In fact, remote work isn't always possible. Fewer than half could do so at least some of the time, according to one Gallup survey. Hourly workers don't get paid if they don't work, and those in retail, manufacturing, or health care usually must be physically present to work.... 'I don't believe people are as productive at home'...."

From "Laundry Between Emails: Working From Home Goes Viral In The Time Of Coronavirus" (NPR).