I can’t really answer the question as it’s written. I have had two classes of job in my career: those I loathed and those I loved. Right now I’m fortuitously lodged in one of the latter; to the question “What do we want from our jobs, anyway?” I’d answer: delight, challenge, pride, achievement, comfort, money, and good people to drink with. I have all of that—although more money is always better—and I’ll stay here until the next ridiculously fun opportunity comes along, at which point I’ll jump ship.

This is not terribly appropriate to the shades-of-gray nature of this prompt, however. And so I’m going to more or less ignore the prompt and replace it with a discussion of the moral equivalent in my life right now: my flatmate.

For the sake of anonymity—a big deal in this forum—I’ll call my flatmate Esther. I’ll also anonymously describe her as a 58-year-old aging hippie, a woman with a stamp-sized impact on (and interest in) the world, a retail worker at an area yarn shop, a semi-professional, “abstract” quilter, and quite possibly the most selfish person I have ever met. This last I am almost certain is not actually true; I’m sure I only say it because of my sustained closeness to Esther. It is at very least hugely ungrateful, because I’ve certainly usurped many elements of Esther’s previously-solitary life, and she’s reacted not only with a good deal of grace but also with genuine kindness and (maddeningly-ostentatious) consideration. But the nicenesses of Esther make for boring reading. Of the many stories I could tell documenting Esther’s many eccentricities, I think I’ll tell the one that happened just yesterday, that inspired me to write about Esther for this essay.

Yesterday I carried my new laptop and printer home with the help of a girl I’ve been seeing out here, who I’ll imaginatively call Lucy. Esther made some ethereal noises about how much I’d like the new laptop—she’d drowned the last one—and then, when I walked into the kitchen to get Lucy a dessert I’d made as a reward for helping me, Esther interjected.

Now, okay. Not to go all Shandean on you, but you do need a little background here. Lucy had been over the night before, and we’d watched a movie, had sex, and then gone to sleep. Esther claims to have supernatural hearing and, for a woman with a personal history that appears to feature both free love and recreational drug use rather prominently, is intensely squeamish about people who aren’t her having sex in her vicinity. I’ve brushed this off as one of those topics we’re going to have to agree to disagree on, and to her credit, Esther has not (yet) demanded that I forego having sex in my room. (I am appreciative.) But that doesn’t mean she’s happy about it. When I went out to get a drink during the movie phase of the evening, Esther, hunched in front of the television screen, angled a look my way that qualified as the dictionary definition of “baleful”. She knew, deep in her bones, the things myself and that hussy were going to get up to and she just needed me to know that she did not approve. I smiled, walked away, giggled, and thought no more about it. The other pertinent piece of background information: I’ve recently been battling some mice that set up shop in our pantry, living in a box full of quilting materials and living off of oatmeal, cumin, and mustard seeds. Esther has not wanted to actively get rid of these critters—she’s said herself she’d rather just “wish them away”—but is nevertheless morbidly fascinated by them; they are a living, moving article in her very static world, and as such they stand out. But a few days ago they made the tactical error of setting up camp under my bed, which amounted to a declaration of war; I bought some mousetraps the other day, and they’ve been pretty effective at keeping the local population quiet. Esther, predictably, wants nothing to do with the traps, and sort of roots for the mice while deploring the fact that they pee everywhere—she also has a keen sense of smell.

Back, at last, to the interjection. Esther, threatened by the possibility of another night of personally-inconvenient hanky-panky (she hasn’t said, but I can only assume it misaligns her chakras), with the rapid-fire delivery of a desperate woman (and the single-mindedness that comes with being physically able to keep only one thing in one’s mind), told Lucy and I about how she had, when nudging our trash sack, accidentally tripped the trap that was next to it, couldn’t be bothered to reset it, and then had been astonished when a delighted mouse had subsequently run into the middle of our kitchen floor. Lucy, who had no plans to spend the night but isn’t terribly fond of mice, sort of tensed up, and Esther, her solitary weapon spent, folded up her wings and removed herself to her room.

To finally return to the putative topic of this essay: I am tired of Esther. After living with her for seven months, I am tired of her neuroses, her stasis, her meddling, her vapidity, and the yawning, infinite emptiness that constitutes her inner life. But! Living with Esther is cheap. Living with Esther is easy. Living with Esther is beautiful, too: my view, as the sun rises, is high over this lovely town with the mountains looming in the distance. I love not owning a car, which living with Esther makes possible. I love having a fully-outfitted kitchen, which Esther to a large degree provides. I like my furnishings, which are similarly Estherean. So here I am, able to look forward to getting a place by myself while simultaneously imagining that I’ll never leave Esther for my entire time here (a prospect that I’m sure haunts Esther even more.)

For me, at least, a lot of the rationale is financial: I don’t make much money, and Esther doesn’t charge much, and for the amount I’m getting I’m unlikely to find a better deal without hard looking. There are conveniences to living with Esther, and she is good value, as they say out here, a great topic for bar conversations and ice-breakers with potential girlfriends. And most creeping, most pernicious, there’s the comfort of the known: I know this place’s pros and cons, and even if it hasn’t been explicit, or conscious, I’ve made peace with the one in favor of the other and am doing just fine. For all of her irritations, I could do a lot worse than Esther, and it’s that fear of the unknown worse that makes me unable to get to the better.

So who knows where this will end up? Things will change, or they won’t, and I’ll probably be fine either way. My home life has never inspired in me the same passion for self-improvement that work has; I’m willing to accept a lot more compromise in where I live than where I work. But nevertheless, living with Esther has the same pattern as my working career, so I think it’ll probably end up going the same way work has for me: I’ll slowly consolidate my position here until moving makes sense, at which time I’ll launch myself into the unknown with a certain degree of recklessness (and expense). And that’ll be fine. But for the moment, there’s nothing forcing me to that quantum change. At least I have the mice.