The key to any strong friendship, or business, is well-coordinated hairstyles.

Not every good professional collaboration becomes a social friendship, some friendships make terrible business partnerships. Maybe the qualities that make people good at working together are different from the ones that develop into deep emotional bonds, and that’s okay.

At the same time,  friendships start in workplaces every day. And doesn’t it sound like a dream to start a fulfilling and successful business with your best friends? How fun would that be?

I have personally found leaping the gap from cool coworker to actual friend very difficult. Maybe that’s just my hangups. How about you?

Do people you like at work become your friends outside of work?

What’s behind your failure or success to merge those worlds?

Do you like things that way, or wish you could change them?

A popular hobby for years, putting a bird on it has only recently become a viable career.

Now that life is so much easier than it was a hundred years ago — very few of us are farming 12 hours a day to feed ourselves — we’ve grown into a world where we don’t just expect to have a job, but have a job that we love. Turn our passion into our work. This Medium post explores the phenomenon:

With fewer reasons to stay in one job, workers began to explore a wider variety of options. For some, these options included turning a hobby into a business. Young people turned to what they loved, what they were good at, with an entrepreneurial mindset angled toward self-employment. It’s why we have so many artisan lollipops and food trucks.

But the side effects are things like convincing yourself that turning your pass time into a second job is somehow noble. Or not really enjoying the thing you loved the same way you used to once you tack on the added pressure to perform, earn, or succeed.

What are the benefits and costs of turning a hobby into a career?

Have you ever wanted to try? What would you do? What stopped you?

Is there something to be said for working a traditional job and pursuing other creative or recreational things purely for pleasure?

Also, which day of the week would you never want to work again?

Corporations dream of continuous growth. It shows prosperity, guarantees healthy stock prices. If GDP moves up, the country is healthy; if it remains flat, the country is “stagnating”. Our whole financial system is based on chasing more and more growth for greater and greater rewards.

Some economists suggest there may be another ideal, the steady state, at which productivity increases lead not to continuous growth, but a more equal distribution of limited resources, and for much of the currently employed, a reduction in work hours as employment hours and free time are essentially redistributed. I’m drastically oversimplifying the premise for a setup here, but if you’re into the economic argument, this fantastic Mother Jones article goes in depth.

Essentially, the proposal is that we all share the amount of employment needed to maintain a healthy steady state, then tax big corporations and the very rich to supplement the services a healthy society shouldn’t make its citizens go broke paying for itself (like health care and education) to make our remaining pay go farther. Interesting theory.

But at the end of the day, an immediate change would be you work less, but make less. We’d have to adjust to less money (and therefore less consumption), and more free time.

Would you be willing to go from a five day to a four day work week for four-fifths (20% less) income?

How would you adjust to having less money? What would you do with the extra time?

What other societal implications or changes might result from a shift like this? Would we be more or less informed and engaged? More or less relaxed and satisfied with our careers? More or less able to travel, or create or appreciate art and culture, or any other positive pursuits?

“I will not waiver in my belief: that my beliefs matter than the beliefs of others.”

The New Yorker puts a cap on the Kim Davis affair with a simple question-slash-concern for what this whole messy business means going forward:

The controversy in Davis’s county may now end without another confrontation (or incarceration). If the marriages are valid with her deputies’ signature, then that will probably defuse the situation. But the principle is still a troubling one—that religious belief carries with it a shopping-cart approach to citizenship. You can choose some obligations but not others, while the legislators and judges figure out which ones are really mandatory. It’s a recipe for further division in an already polarized society—and the prospects, in Kentucky and elsewhere, are for more conflict, not less.

My personal opinion aside (if you must know, I believe the whole thing could have been easily avoided without legal action, but the fuss did bring out an awful lot of idiocy, generally), the bigger issues do provide room for debate.

Whether you agree or not with Kim Davis in this instance, should people have the right to be excused from performing specific job tasks because of personal belief?

Is that answer the same when they are holding elected office?

In the balance between a personal freedom issue and a separation of church and state issue, which takes priority?

Now the coworkers you can’t stand and the roommates that drive you nuts can be the SAME PEOPLE.

Buzzfeed News has a long piece about a potential new trend that builds on the trendy shared “co-working” spaces so hot with the hopeful startup crowd. Apparently the next step is “co-living”:

Co-living offers up the same short-term leases and the same promises as co-working, except community members (it is always a “community”) get a bed instead of a desk. In both cases, practitioners sacrifice space for proximity to like-minded people and access to perks. WeLive and Common and The Caravanserai and their ilk purport, essentially, to do for the home what WeWork has already done for the office: Sweat the small stuff. Make you feel like a boss. Feed your body and your intellect. “WE TAKE CARE OF ALL THE ‘STUFF’, SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO ANYMORE,” The Caravanserai’s Haid promises on his website; the impossible-to-spell startup says it’s geared toward “professionals who seek a great work life balance and don’t want to waste time piecing it together themselves.”

In typical startup fashion, the promise is not having to do any normal boring human stuff, so you have more time to focus on bringing your brilliant ideas into the world. But also, erasing the line (and that bothersome transition) between work and non-work, since when you’re changing the world, isn’t it all about the work, man?

Is erasing the division between work and life by living and working in the same place just another step on a terrible trajectory?

Or are the people who love what they do so much that it becomes their whole reason for being actually the ones we should be envious of?

What kind of people would you want to work with, or what kind of project would you want to work on, that would make this setup a good thing?