It has perhaps never been true that everyone could find work that they love. In many ways, that is a fantasy.

Life intrudes on dreams, in many ways. But for me, there is no life without dreams. I think what was once true is that people who wanted to love what they did had a fair shot at doing it. Our needs were simpler. The nature of work has changed, as has the nature of life. People work today for security. To be able to buy health care. For retirement. For the newest devices. We are told every day it is expensive to get old and die in America, save up for it. And for good credit. A lot of things are considered essential today that didn’t exist a few years ago – cell phones, computers, cable and Internet, long-term care insurance, big IRA’s.

Loving what one does has dropped far down the list since Thoreau’s time. He believed that since we have a limited time here on earth we should not waste that time doing work we do not love and that is not important to us. Slavery is slavery, he wrote, noxious in any form. Corporations did not exist in his time, nor was there the idea of health care or IRA’s, but I imagine he would have found working for health care or retirement funds a form of slavery, as I do. Work did offer security once, and also meaning. The mew corporate economy has done away with such inefficient notions. Start saving.

As a father, I understand why people work for health care, and I do not judge anyone who chooses to do it,  there is enormous pressure on people, America’s media, medical, political and legal fear machine works day and night to keep us too anxious to do what we love. Our Orwellian media tells us hourly how dangerous life is, warns us about what we need.

And the list of things we need grows long and dire, and for most of us increasingly out of reach. A federal official gave an interview yesterday in which he said studies show 70 per cent of Americans over 65 will need at least three years of long term care, and since it is so expensive, they will surely lose all of their savings unless they buy long term care insurance. But, an interviewer prodded, long term health care insurance is so expensive few people can afford it. Only the people who don’t need it can afford it. Yes, said the official, that is true. And even if most people could afford it, it will probably not cover the things they need when the time comes. This is how the White Rabbit might have explained “security” to Alice. You have to have it, but you can’t afford it.

I thought of the person who stays in an awful job for years to have health care, gives up her dreams for life, only to find her savings vanish when he gets older because doesn’t have long term care insurance. Or to end up living in a way they hate and never wanted. What a price to pay for life, for security. What is his or her epitaph, what goes in the obit? He gave his life up to insurance and pharmaceutical companies, but he almost had enough insurance to pay for it? The tradeoff from Hell, for me.

I never tell other people what to do, I know better than that. But Thoreau speaks for me, as usual. Life is too short. We should, he said, be as covetous of our time as other people are about their money. My grandparents did not escape from Russia with nothing but their lives so that I can surrender my life again to other people’s expectations. I am greedy of my time. I am saving up love and creativity and meaning so that at the end of my life, even if I am living in a tent, I can put this on my tombstone or on the jar that holds my ashes: he loved what he did. And pray that studies of the future don’t report that 70 per cent of Americans over 65 threw their lives away for the promise of security they never got to have.