"Did you enjoy it?"

I've been thinking about this interview Conan O’Brien did with Jon Stewart. They were talking about their early TV years — those first shows where every week’s ratings felt like life or death. The pressure made the job miserable.

Stewart said that a few weeks into The Jon Stewart Show, he could already tell it was doomed.

"We knew this thing's going down. But I had your experience of like, this is my shot. Like, this is it. My name is on [a show]. This is a manifestation of who I am as an artist, as a person. If it gets rejected, I am rejected. I wasn't sleeping. I was really miserable. I was drinking like a motherfucker. All those different things. And one night in my insomnia, 3 o'clock in the morning, 4 o'clock in the morning, I just remember thinking, you're going to have had your own talk show with your name on it where you could do whatever you wanted [...]. And people are going to say, "Did you enjoy it?" And I would have to say, I hated it. And I think it nearly destroyed me. And what a dumb fucking response. And that morning I got up and was like, I'm going to enjoy the shit out of this. Yeah. And I don't care anymore. Yeah. And it was revelatory. And it was such a, I felt it physically, like that relief."

The show was canceled soon after, but it's a good reminder for anyone currently doing their dream job — how’s it going?