Work to Live, Not Live to Work: Why I Quit Offshore & the Priorities it Taught Me

I took a job for the money once. I was twenty-three, freshly graduated from a Marine Geography degree, and was offered money I’d never dreamed of to work offshore. Since I had very few other options at the time, I accepted, quickly rushing off to spend the money I’d not earned yet. 

No twenty-three year old, at least not one like me, should be given a lot of money. Did I save it? Learn how to invest? Start buying a portfolio of excellent art? No. I bought a brand new Barbour jacket (it’s since gone missing) and some nice luggage, took my mum out for lunches and had parcels of useless tat arrive at the house daily. That was, unless I was actually doing the job they paid me for.

While the majority of my peers landed gigs with fixed rotations — a guaranteed number of weeks at sea and weeks at home — I did not. I was on call every day. Would I be home for Christmas? No idea. Could I RSVP to that wedding? No way.

At a friend’s barbecue I got the message once: you’re being deployed tomorrow, a hire car will come for you at 8am, be ready. I was like a superhero, except I really didn’t give a fuck about the work I was doing and I had to drive to places like Grimsby and Great Yarmouth. Not exactly Gotham City. 

The job itself: join the crew of a survey vessel, sit at a desk with fifteen monitors, and support cable-lay prep or sub-sea survey work for the likes of Shell or BP. I tried to hold a yoga practice together in seven-metre swells. I dealt with rampant misogyny as a matter of course. And nobody could tell me if any contract I worked was two weeks or six months.

I lasted less than a year before I left and joined a marketing agency. I swapped the insanity of a unfixed-schedule offshore job — where I’d dealt with a lack of fresh water for days after the tanks burst, and men asking if I was on my period if I looked at them funny — with an hour-long commute, meetings so tedious they’d make a chronic insomniac fall asleep, and banal office politics. I’d swapped one misery for another. 

But at least I was being paid.

Why We Let Money Be Queen

When you're a twenty-something graduate with a mountain of debt, money becomes the guide. We're told to get on the property ladder, build the savings, buy the things advertised to you in every spare second of your day. If keeping up with the Joneses is the whole point, then the maths is simple — earn as much as you can, doing whatever doesn't make you want to jump off a tall building. Life, sorted.

Except there's a reason mid-life crises exist.

My question is: why wait until midlife to notice your priorities got scrambled somewhere along the way? Why wait to admit the well-paid, soul-flattening job was never actually the right call? That the poetry, or stand-up, or glass-making was the real thing all along? That enjoying your actual days might be worth more than the BMW, the five-bed house, and the all-inclusive to Mauritius, combined?

Productivity Was Meant to Be the Means, Not the End

We've built an entire culture around work as the be-all and end-all. Ask for the pay rise. Angle for the promotion that hands you more work and just enough extra money to almost keep pace with inflation.

Somewhere along the way, productivity — which was supposed to buy us more rest, more time off, more life — became the whole point instead. Rest got bolted on as an afterthought, justified only because it makes us more productive. Even our downtime has a KPI now.

What If We Wanted Less?

What if the house, the car, the holiday, the Dyson that both vacuums and mops while you sleep, the next iPhone, the ten-minutes-ago-you-didn't-know-you-needed-it thing in your Instagram feed — what if all of it is precisely what's keeping you stressed, tethered to a job you don't love, and stuck on the treadmill of more?

That treadmill has a name. It's the philosophy of consumerism — money as queen, productivity as the goal, more at any cost.

Picture the person you'll be decades from now, looking back at you today. What are they telling you? What's your actual philosophy — not the one you inherited, the one you'd choose?

Life can cost less. We can work to live, not the other way around. And we can start the midlife crises whenever we want, if only we’d be open enough to realise we’ve been taught the wrong priorities all along.

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This is an extract from the book I'm currently writing. To get more of my words, direct to your inbox, join me on Substack.