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I used to tell this story, about my theory of fucks. The theory goes like so: you are born with so many fucks to give. However many you’ve got is all there is; they are like eggs, that way. Some of us are born with quite a lot, some with less, but none of us knows how many we have. When we’re young, we go around giving a fuck about all kinds of things, blissfully unaware of our ever-dwindling supply. Until one day, we give the last fuck we’ve got, and we notice that the invisible bag of fucks we’ve been carrying around all these years is finally, irredeemably, empty. We have no more fucks left to give.

If I’m being honest, I told this story to myself more than anyone else. I needed an explanation for why a well I’d been drawing from all my life had suddenly run dry, why things I had cared about seemed so abruptly to matter little at all. I had given a lot of fucks, some wantonly and capriciously, some thoughtfully and cautiously and tenderly, but no matter how they were given, they were given up. They were gone.

I still tell this story but I’ve changed it somewhat. Like most stories, it got better with retelling. I still think fucks are like eggs—I mean, how could they not be, life is short. But I realize now that if you can give a fuck then you must also be able to receive. And that’s the key. You cannot manufacture more fucks. You cannot grow them or graft them or transplant them. You absolutely cannot buy them, not from anywhere or anyone, not at any price. But you can receive them as a gift, you can accept them. And in that way your collection of fucks to give can be renewed.

This is one of my answers to the question of, why give a fuck about work? Why love your work? It won’t, of course, love you back. It can’t. Work isn’t a thing that can love. It isn’t alive, it isn’t and won’t ever be living. And my answer is: don’t. Don’t give a fuck about your work. Give all your fucks to the living. Give a fuck about the people you work with, and the people who receive your work—the people who use the tools and products and systems or, more often than not, are used by them. Give a fuck about the land and the sea, all the living things that are used or used up by the work, that are abandoned or displaced by it, or—if we’re lucky, if we’re persistent and brave and willing—are cared for through the work. Give a fuck about yourself, about your own wild and tender spirit, about your peace and especially about your art. Give every last fuck you have to living things with beating hearts and breathing lungs and open eyes, with chloroplasts and mycelia and water-seeking roots, with wings and hands and leaves. Give like every fuck might be your last.

Because here’s what I’ve learned: if you give your fucks to the unliving—if you plant those fucks in institutions or systems or platforms or, gods forbid, interest rates—you will run out of fucks. One day you will reach into that bag and your hand will meet nothing but air and you will be bereft. You will realize the loss of something you did not know you ever had. But if you give a fuck about the living, about all your living kin in all the kingdoms, they will give a fuck right back. Maybe not every one of them; maybe not every time. Some people’s bags have been empty for a long while, and they may feel the need to ration whatever they have; some people have been taught that to give a fuck is to lose something, not realizing that to withhold is what it means to lose. But I believe—I know from having given and received, from having lost and been renewed—that enough of them will come back that you can keep on giving, for a while at least, for as long as any of us has time to give.

That’s what work is, after all. Work—the action of change, the movement of energy from one being to another—is the means by which fucks are granted. Good work is the art of giving a fuck about the living. And all of us, every day, are faced with good work that needs doing, and good work that we can do.