Forty minutes on the court

Two men play squash in Hurghada on a weeknight. For forty minutes nothing else exists. Every ball is chased, every point disputed, legs gone by the third game. Then they shake hands, sit on the bench with their water bottles, and go home.

There is a particular joy in giving something everything you have. Holding nothing back, walking off with nothing left. People who have felt it tend to chase it. Plenty of people go years without feeling it once.

The phones we carry make both outcomes easier. They can pull us into a contest that never ends: messages at midnight, a feed of people doing more, a goal that moves every time we get close. Or they can do the opposite and turn us into spectators, scrolling past other people's effort from the sofa, having everything brought to the door, watching instead of playing.

Neither is a good way to live. Permanent effort wears people down. Permanent comfort hollows them out.

What the squash court has that the phone does not is walls. It is small enough that everything you put in actually counts, and the game has an end. When it ends, you leave. Not because you lost, but because the thing is finished and it was worth finishing.

That is the shape worth looking for in work as well. A bounded piece, given everything, then put down. Then rest, then the next one.

The bench afterwards is not the opposite of the game. It is half of it.