Professional Interpreters and the Unwasted Life: Hawthorne's Four Precepts for Sustainable Practice

By Sarah Wheeler, M.Ed., M.S.

The Critical Moment

There's a particular moment that comes for many professional interpreters, usually somewhere between year five and year ten, when they look up from the work and realize they can't quite remember who they were before they found themselves in the center of other people's stories.

You remember the passion that drew you to interpreting. The fascination with language. The desire to bridge different worlds. The profound satisfaction of facilitating meaningful communication. But somewhere along the way, something shifted. The work that once felt like a calling began to feel like extraction. A slow, steady siphoning of something essential.

You're successful by every external measure. You get called back for assignments. Your interpretation skills are sharp. Your professionalism is unquestioned. And yet there's a nagging sense, rumbling at first, then gradually insistent, that you're living at half-capacity. That you're spending your days meeting everyone else's communication needs while your own inner life goes malnourished.

If this resonates, you're not alone. Research on occupational stress among interpreters documents significant rates of burnout and psychological distress, particularly in emotionally demanding settings.

The Man Who Was Terrified of Wasting Sunlight

Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804 to May 19, 1864) was haunted by a fear that haunts us all: the fear of looking back on life with "a lament for life's wasted sunshine."

This wasn't abstract philosophical musing. Fatherless from age four, so achingly introverted he was reported to duck behind trees and rocks to avoid speaking with townspeople, and described by Hermann Melville as a man of "great, genial, comprehending silences," Hawthorne felt deeply the brevity of life and the urgency of filling it with meaning. He was acutely conscious that he had already lived more than half his store of living without certainty of its value.

In his early thirties, not knowing he had already lived more than half his allotted time, Hawthorne wrote down what he believed it would take to have an "unwasted life." Between story ideas (one of which would become The Scarlet Letter), tender records of raising his young son, and lyrical accounts of his rambles in nature, he distilled his philosophy into four precepts. On August 31, 1836, he recorded in his journal:

Four precepts: To break off customs; to shake off spirits ill-disposed; to meditate on youth; to do nothing against one's genius.

These aren't feel-good platitudes. They're a survival manual for anyone who's ever felt trapped in a life that looks right from the outside but feels wrong on the inside. They're especially relevant for professional interpreters.

First Precept: To Break Off Customs

The interpreting profession runs on unwritten rules about how to dress, how to position yourself, how to manage your face, body, and emotional responses. Customs about what counts as "professional." Customs about boundaries, neutrality, and the proper distance to maintain from the people whose most intimate moments you facilitate.

These customs aren't inherently bad. Many exist for good reasons: to protect both interpreters and the people being served, to maintain ethical standards, to ensure quality in interpretation work. But Hawthorne understood something critical: customs calcify. What begins as a useful guideline becomes an unquestioned law. Eventually, you're following rules you never consciously chose, inhabiting a professional identity that may have nothing to do with who you actually are.

Hawthorne wrote that society is "a conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members." For interpreters, this conspiracy takes concrete form in the customs that surround our bodies, our communication, our very right to exist on our own terms.

The psychologist Carl Rogers distinguished between the "self-concept" (who we think we should be) and the "organismic self" (who we actually are). When these diverge too far, we experience what Rogers called "incongruence": a kind of existential dissonance that manifests as anxiety, emptiness, or the sense that we're living someone else's life. Rogers developed this framework through his work with patients suffering from emotional disorders, finding that many held inaccurate beliefs about themselves often reinforced by their parents or cultural messaging.

For professional interpreters, this often shows up as: going through the motions, feeling disconnected from work that once meant everything, or the creeping suspicion that you've become very good at being someone you don't particularly like.

Breaking off customs doesn't mean abandoning ethics or professionalism. It means examining which customs serve your actual humanity and which ones you're following simply because "that's how it's done."

Ask yourself: Which of my professional habits are life-giving, and which are life-draining?

Second Precept: To Shake Off Internalized Oppression

In Hawthorne's time, "spirits ill-disposed" meant the prevailing attitudes, the cultural atmosphere, the collective mood that shapes how we see ourselves and our possibilities. Every profession has its ill-disposed spirits: unspoken beliefs that circulate like viruses through the community.

For interpreters, some of these show up like:

Your feelings don't matter. Only the accuracy of your work matters.

If you're struggling emotionally, you're not cut out for this profession.

Real professionals can handle anything without it affecting them.

Self-care is personal wellness, not systemic change.

If you need help, you're weak.

These spirits are toxic not because they're entirely false, but because they're partial truths that metastasize into harmful beliefs. Yes, accuracy matters, but not more than your humanity. Yes, professionals should be resilient, but resilience isn't emotional suppression. Yes, self-care is important, but individual wellness can't fix structural problems in how the profession treats its practitioners.

The philosopher Michel Foucault wrote extensively about how power operates through normalization: how we internalize institutional judgments until we police ourselves more effectively than any external authority could. In his foundational work Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes how marginalized groups internalize the oppressive narratives of dominant systems, eventually internalizing surveillance and self-regulation. You don't need a supervisor telling you to ignore your responses anymore. You've internalized that narrative. It's become part of your inner dialogue.

Shaking off spirits ill-disposed means recognizing which beliefs in your head aren't actually yours. Which convictions about professionalism, competence, and resilience are really the profession talking, not your own wisdom about what you need to survive and thrive.

Third Precept: To Meditate on Youth

This surprises people. What does youth have to do with a meaningful professional life?

Everything.

Hawthorne isn't being nostalgic. He's not suggesting regression to childishness. He's pointing to something profound: the quality of attention and aliveness that children possess before the world teaches them to be smaller, passive, more controlled.

Children are curious. They ask "why" constantly. They feel their feelings fully, grief and joy and rage and delight, without the self-consciousness that makes adults perform emotions rather than experience them. They play for play's sake. They learn for learning's sake, not to accumulate credentials.

Most importantly, children haven't yet learned to split themselves in half: the acceptable public self and the hidden real self.

When you first entered interpreting, you likely were more in touch with this quality. You were curious about language and meaning. Fascinated by the challenge. Drawn to the human connection at the heart of the work. You probably had ideals, maybe even naive ones, about making a difference, bridging understanding, facilitating connection.

Then the profession taught you to be realistic. Practical. Professional. It taught you that your idealism was charming but unsustainable. It taught you to protect yourself by caring less, feeling less, hoping less.

Hawthorne himself reflected on this when he wrote: "I look back upon a day spent in what the world would call idleness, and for which I can myself suggest no more appropriate epithet; and which, nevertheless, I cannot feel to have been spent amiss. True; it might be a sin and shame, in such a world as ours, to spend a lifetime in this manner; but, for a few summer-weeks, it is good to live as if the world were Heaven."

The developmental psychologist Robert Kegan talks about the "subject-object shift": our ability to take what we're embedded in and make it something we can observe and reflect on. When we can do this with our own professional identity, we gain the freedom to choose which parts we want to keep and which no longer serve us.

You're allowed to reclaim the parts of yourself that got filed away as "unprofessional" or "unrealistic." They might be the most professional and realistic parts of you.

Fourth Precept: To Do Nothing Against One's Genius

In Hawthorne's time, "genius" didn't mean exceptional intelligence. It meant your essential spirit: the particular way you're animated by life. Your genius is what makes you you, not a generic professional unit.

This precept cuts deepest for interpreters, because the very nature of the work requires you to make yourself as neutral as possible. You're trained to be a conduit, to suppress your personality, opinions, and style in service of accurate message transfer and meaning-making.

This is necessary for the work. But it's deadly if it becomes who you are rather than what you do during specific assignments.

The existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote about "the sickness unto death": not physical death, but despair. The condition of being "unwilling to be oneself." Kierkegaard described it as the spiritual sickness that results from not aligning oneself with one's authentic self. He defined this despair as fundamentally about a "misrelation" between who we are and who we're pretending to be, arguing that "to despair over oneself, in despair to will to be rid of oneself: this is the formula for all despair."

Interpreters are at particular risk for this kind of despair. The profession requires you to not be yourself during assignments. The danger comes when you can no longer turn it off. When the professional mask becomes your face.

Doing nothing against your genius means recognizing where your professional requirements end and your personal life begins. It means creating space for the parts of yourself that serve no productive purpose: your weird sense of humor, your impractical hobbies, your tendency to feel deeply about stories or ideas, your passion for obscure topics: whatever makes you specifically you rather than "Interpreter Unit Number 47."

It also means recognizing when the work itself has become toxic to your essential self. Not every interpreter is suited for every setting. Not every job deserves your continued presence just because you're skilled at it, it pays well, or leaving would seem "unprofessional."

Sometimes the most professional thing you can do is admit: This work is killing something essential in me. I need to find a different way.

The Tyranny of Wasted Time

Here's where Hawthorne's insights become uncomfortable for those of us raised in productivity culture.

He spent significant periods doing what looked like absolutely nothing: tending his garden, reading, resting, walking, observing nature. He understood that what the world calls "wasted time" is often where the most essential work happens. During his time in Concord, Massachusetts, living in a house on the banks of the Assabeth River, he wrote: "My life, at this time, is more like that of a boy, externally, than it has been since I was really a boy. My business is merely to live and to enjoy; and whatever is essential to life and enjoyment will come as naturally as the dew from Heaven."

The neuroscience is clear: our brains need unstructured time to process, integrate, and make sense of experience. The default mode network (the brain system that activates during rest) is actually incredibly active during these periods, consolidating memories, making creative connections, and maintaining our sense of self.

When you move from assignment to assignment with no buffer, no processing time, no space to simply be, you're not being productive. You're fragmenting. The "wasted" time isn't waste. It's the composting that makes growth possible.

The literary critic Maria Popova synthesizes Hawthorne's insights on this point: "What fortifies the spirit to do its work in the world, be it art or activism, often appears on the surface as wasted time: the hours spent walking in a forest and watching the clouds over the city skyline and pebble-hunting on the beach, the purposeless play of the mind daydreaming and body dancing, all the while ideas and fortitudes fermenting within."

What Makes a Life Unwasted?

Hawthorne's answer: "All sorts of persons, and every individual, has a place to fill in the world, and is important in some respects, whether he chooses to be so or not."

You don't have to earn importance through maximum productivity. You don't have to justify your existence by how many assignments you take, how perfect your skills are, or how successfully you've suppressed your responses.

You're important simply because you exist. Your particular genius, your specific way of being human, matters not because of what it produces but because it's yours.

The philosopher Martin Buber distinguished between "I-It" relationships (treating others as objects to be used) and "I-Thou" relationships (encountering others as whole beings with inherent worth). In his foundational work I and Thou (1923), Buber articulated that in I-Thou relationships, both individuals engage with one another as whole beings, without judgment, agenda, or objectification, while in I-It relationships, we relate to another as object, completely outside of ourselves.

The same distinction applies to how you relate to yourself:

Are you treating yourself as an "It": a tool to be optimized, a resource to be extracted, a machine to be kept running at maximum efficiency?

Or are you treating yourself as a "Thou": a being with inherent worth, deserving care, attention, and space to unfold according to your own nature?

The Four Precepts in Practice

Breaking off customs might mean questioning the unwritten rule that you should take every assignment offered. It might mean finding ways to be professionally excellent without performing emotional invulnerability.

Shaking off spirits ill-disposed might mean noticing when you're making choices based on what "a good interpreter" would do rather than what you actually need. It might mean surrounding yourself with colleagues who talk honestly about struggle instead of performing invincibility.

Meditating on youth might mean revisiting what first drew you to interpreting and asking whether any of that original vision can be reclaimed. It might mean allowing yourself curiosity instead of cynicism.

Doing nothing against your genius might mean setting boundaries that protect your essential self, even if they make you seem "difficult" or "not a team player." It might mean leaving situations that require you to violate your own integrity.

None of this is easy. All of it is necessary.

The Measure of an Unwasted Life

Hawthorne died uncertain whether his work mattered, whether his life had been wasted. History answered for him: his books are still read, his insights still resonate, and the questions he wrestled with are still ours.

But here's what matters more: by his own measure, the four precepts he set down, his life was anything but wasted. He broke with customs. He rejected the spirit that measured worth by conventional success. He maintained connection with wonder and curiosity. He never violated his genius, even when it would have been easier and more lucrative to write differently.

The same could be true for you.

You may not be remembered by history. Most of us won't be. And that's okay. What matters is this: that you reach the end of your interpreting career and know that you didn't betray yourself. That you found a way to do the work without losing yourself. That you honored both your professional commitments and your essential humanity.

That you lived fully instead of carefully.

That you didn't waste your one wild and precious life trying to be the perfect interpreter instead of being yourself.