Your job gets your hours, not your whole name. Keep a few things it can’t touch.

Work can expand until it supplies your whole identity, which feels fine while it is going well and leaves you with nothing when it is not. Hours are a fair trade; a name is not. Keeping a few things that have nothing to do with it means there is always a part of you a bad week cannot reach.

Name two things that are yours regardless of what you do for money: a sport, a friendship, a craft, somewhere you go. Protect a slot for one of them this week even when work would happily take it. Keeping that habit now is easier than building it later.