I got engaged. Then opened my laptop the next morning.

Not every weekend worker is burning out.

She said yes on a Friday night.

We celebrated. Good dinner, with her family, not as romantic as I was planning to (still hear that until today), but it was a nice night.

Saturday morning I woke up, made coffee, and opened my laptop.

Not because I was anxious. Not because something was on fire. Not because I couldn’t switch off. I opened it because I wanted to.

I’ve been trying to explain this for years and most people don’t buy it. The assumption is that if you’re working on a weekend - especially a weekend like that one - something is wrong. You’re avoiding something. You’re addicted to productivity. You don’t know how to rest.

Maybe that’s true for some people. It’s not true for me.

The thing is. A few years ago I was in Bali. Someone at a co-working space told me I should close the laptop and go relax. I told them that working in the morning is how I relax. They looked at me like I’d said something deeply broken.

But I meant it. Sitting with coffee, reading something interesting, poking at a problem I’ve been thinking about - that’s not the opposite of rest for me. That’s part of what rest looks like.

My fiancée knows this. She’s always known it. She didn’t say yes to a version of me that was going to wake up on a Saturday and go for a long run and journal and be fully off-grid until Monday. That guy doesn’t exist. She said yes to the guy who would be on the couch with coffee and a laptop by 6am, probably happy about it.

That matters. Because I think the conversation around work and rest has gotten weirdly binary. Either you’re burned out and grinding, or you’ve achieved some enlightened state of disconnection. There’s not much space for a third option: you just actually like what you’re building.

The real question is why, not how much.

If someone’s working on a Saturday because they’re scared of falling behind, that’s worth looking at. If they’re doing it because their inbox gives them anxiety and staying busy keeps that quiet, same thing. Those are real problems.

But if someone opens their laptop because they’re genuinely interested in what they’re working on? That’s just... a person with work they care about. Not a cautionary tale.

I’ve been in global hiring for a bunch of years now. I’ve tested more EOR providers than I care to count. And the weird part is - I find it interesting. Not performing-interesting for a newsletter. Actually interesting. The plumbing of how people get paid across borders, how compliance breaks down in weird edge cases, how companies get this wrong in the same ways over and over. I like thinking about it.

So Saturday morning after getting engaged, I opened my laptop and read something about payroll compliance in Southeast Asia, build some new features for our platforms, took some notes. It was a good morning.

Then I closed it and we went to brunch.

I’m not writing this to be contrarian or to make a point about hustle culture. I genuinely don’t care how other people structure their weekends. But I do think there’s a version of the rest-and-recovery conversation that accidentally makes people feel guilty for enjoying their work. Like if you’re not forcing yourself to step away, you must not understand what’s good for you.

Some of us are just wired differently. Building things is one of the good parts of life for me - not the thing I do between the good parts.

She knows that. She said yes anyway.

Good outcome.