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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Are You Tired Of Work? So Is Everyone Else Why Are So Many People Leaving Their Careers Early?

Bonnie Miller Rubin Chicago Tribune

Basketball player Michael Jordan quit the Chicago Bulls at his peak because the thrill was gone. So did Chicago Cubs superstar Ryne Sandberg. Gary Larson, “The Far Side” cartoonist, just retired at 44 because he feared his work would slide into mediocrity. Anna Quindlen, Pulitzer-prize winning columnist of The New York Times, recently stepped off the fast track to write novels and stay home with her kids. Harvard University President Neil Rudenstine is on leave because he’s “worn to a frazzle.”

What’s going on here? If those with some of the most glamorous jobs in America are dissatisfied - people who get six-figure salaries, limousines and thunderous ovations - what about the rest of us? How are we supposed to charge up the hill and capture the prize for the company?

We can’t. We won’t. We’re tired.

It wasn’t always this way. At one time, we came early, stayed late, worked weekends, dragged home briefcases and dutifully checked our voice mail, even on vacation. But now, what’s the point?

The perks - the promotions, the raises and bonuses, the job security - are all but gone, and our ambition has evaporated right along with it. So, we’ll just take a desk out of the way, even in some suburban outpost, if it means we can have a life in return.

Thanks to technology - to computers, faxes, cellular phones and laptops - the barrier between home and office has been removed, so we could be available 24 hours a day. Like some kind of Pac-Man, work devoured every waking moment until there was no time for anything else. Those were the rules. For 15, 20, even 25 years, we accepted them. But now, we’ll pass on the brass ring.

“I’m squeezed dry,” an IBM manager says. “Besides, if you’re out of the loop, it can’t be slipped around your neck.”

An unmistakable job malaise has settled over the country like a fog, researchers say, and one need look no farther than the next cubicle to know that they are right.

With baby boomers getting older, organizations getting flatter and the contract between employer and employee - the one that said if you worked hard and kept your nose clean, you would be taken care of - virtually dead, driving yourself hardly seems worth it anymore.

“The signs are everywhere; people are at the end of the line in what they’re willing to give up in their humanity,” says Jeremy Rifkin, an economist and author of “The End of Work,” a provocative new book that examines the changing workplace. “The mental fatigue today is every bit as significant as the physical fatigue of the early Industrial Revolution.”

What is significant is not the exhaustion but that it has gripped one of the most educated, driven and overachieving generations in history. Everywhere you go, the talk is about slowing things down; about sabbaticals and resigning partnerships and scaling back to parttime status. When Mickey Kaus, a columnist for The New Republic, recently flipped through Yale University’s alumni report, he was struck with the fact that fellow 1974 graduates craved less, not more.

Wrote one Yalie: “As the commitment to achieve fades … forward momentum fueled by the desire to advance one’s position has come slowly to a halt. … I am beginning to discover the beauty of and the satisfaction in standing still.”

We’re in the midst of a seismic psychological shift about defining success, according to Mitchell Marks, an organizational psychologist and director of the Delta Consulting Group in New York, which advises senior executives of Fortune 500 firms.

With the first of the baby boomers hitting 50 this year, it is a logical time for taking stock, for reflecting on what has been done and what is left to do. As people enter the second half of life, they’re asking themselves, “Is this really how I want to spend my valuable time?”

“There is a realization that there is more to life than where I am on the organizational chart,” says Marks, author of “From Turmoil to Triumph,” a book that addresses life after downsizing. “People see a workplace with scant advancement opportunities, limited pay increases and fewer resources to get the job done. It prompts them to ask, `What’s the payoff for working so hard?”’

Along with the psychological aspects, there are the physical realities of aging. Although vigor is not the sole province of the young, it is harder to sustain the frenzied pace of 25-year-olds. In-line skating, vitamin-popping, Evian-swilling boomers may be loathe to admit it, but the days of working until 2 a.m. are over.

The voracious demands of the workplace show no signs of abating, however. Primarily because of downsizing, the amount of time spent on the job has grown by 158 hours a year - nearly a whole month - over the past two decades, according to Juliet Schor, Harvard economist and author of “The Overworked American.” At the same time, the amount of paid vacation and sick leave has declined by almost four days.

In every previous period of history, increases in technology have resulted in a steady reduction in the number of hours worked. The opposite has occurred since the birth of the computer revolution, which made it possible for fewer people to do more work. “If current trends continue,” Rivkin says, “by the end of the century Americans will be spending as much time at their jobs as they did back in the 1920s.”

And that doesn’t even take into account commuting, which in a metropolitan area can add two or three hours to the workday.

Not only are people working longer, they’re working more intensely. As jobs have been eliminated, survivors are now doing the tasks of two or three people and living constantly with the everratcheting pressures of productivity.

In a national survey of 3,400 workers developed by the Families and Work Institute in New York, 80 percent believe their jobs require working very hard, 65 percent said their jobs require working very fast and 42 percent often feel “used up” by the end of the day. The Japanese even have a word for it, “karoshi,” which literally means dropping dead at your desk.

At the same time, we’ve been all but overwhelmed by responsibilities at home. Sixty percent of all women are back in the work force before their babies are 1 year old. Fewer fathers fit “The Organization Man” profile of the 1950s, since they, too, must be available to stay home when day-care arrangements go haywire.

Everybody is stretched too thin. The only problem is that just when we need to find secure niches, where we can take it a little easier, those niches are disappearing. “The nation’s economy and demography are heading in different directions,” Kaus said in The New Republic.

“In the past, as people aged, it was pretty clear that they couldn’t keep up with technology and hours, but they were kept around because of their wisdom and because they were carriers of the corporate culture,” says David Noer, a vice president for the Center for Creative Leadership, a non-profit research and education institute in Greensboro, N.C.

“When aging Eskimos could no longer chew whale meat, they put them on an iceberg to die. Now, we’re turning out our elders … we’re turning into Eskimos.”

Under the new contract - the one that says we’ll keep you as long as we need you - it is more important to forge a tighter relationship with your customers than your boss, who may be of limited assistance if the company decides to cut you loose, Noer adds. Professional associations are essential, too. Not only can they help you in times of trouble, they also can furnish the social outlet that once was provided by the company.

Robin Hardman of the Families and Work Institute sums up the new contract this way: We won’t promise you lifetime employment and, in exchange, we won’t hold you so strictly to the old rules. It has opened the door for employees to take advantage of family-friendly policies - such as job-sharing, part-time status and flex time - which used to carry heavy career consequences.

This shift has not been brought about by any moral imperative but rather the need for a work force that can expand and contract and reshape itself as economic conditions demand. Today’s workplace has more temporary workers, part-time workers, even the beginnings of what is called task employment. Several corporations even offer one or two years of employment, and then you’re out.

The good job, once the badge of responsibility, is now risky, and freelance activity that was once risky is now the choice of people who want to act responsibly, according to Fortune magazine.

The lessons have not been lost on survivors. Given increasing job insecurity, employees are searching for ways to nurture the other areas of their lives. It’s not a grand, defiant gesture but rather a series of small, subtle changes.

Perhaps it starts with reading a novel on the train instead of a trade journal. Or not bringing work home on weekends. Then it’s a promise to be on the 6:08 every night. Or to stop working through lunch, and instead spend the noon hour in a Bible study group or other spiritual exercises, as one group of Chicago investment bankers has done.

Then the thought of not commuting at all starts to sound pretty good. You transfer to a satellite office, away from the meetings and the company grapevine that used to be so important but also drained time from your day. Perhaps you’ll embrace telecommuting and move the whole operation to your basement. Without even realizing it, you have stepped off the track.

It would be a mistake to take this throttling back as a sign that Americans don’t care about their jobs. Indeed, the work ethic is as strong as ever. In the Families/Work survey, 99 percent of the respondents agreed with the statement, “I always try to do my job well.”

They just long for more control.

They want to eat dinner as a family. They want to attend Little League games and be home to help their kids with their homework. They want to see friends.

No longer able to put their faith in careerism, they long for purpose to their lives. They’d rather invest time at a local soup kitchen or a neighborhood group than in boosting the company’s bottom line.

In short, they want more time, and the average worker is willing to take a 5 percent pay cut to get it, according to a Department of Labor study.

“It’s not ambition itself that is lacking,” says Cheryl Heisler, a Chicago career consultant. “It is the ambition to succeed on other people’s terms.”

Last year, Heisler, president of Lawternatives, helped 1,000 professionals make career moves - some of them back down the ladder, such as doctors who wanted out of administrative positions.

“You can have all the trappings of success, but if they don’t make you happy, what good are they?” asks Heisler, a former attorney who moved to a marketing job at Kraft and found them both an ill fit.

“For some people, the title and the prestige are not enough. Even judges,- the pinnacle of the law profession, have found themselves unsatisfied. … They got away from what it was that attracted them to the profession in the first place. People say, `What’s wrong with me?’ Nothing is wrong. The problem comes when you force yourself into an area that’s not for you … for which you have no passion.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, calls that passion “flow.” It’s that state of mind when people are completely absorbed in their work. Maybe it happens when you’re painting, woodworking or gardening, when you are so engaged in the activity at hand that you’re astonished to find that the hours have flown by. Over the past 30 years, Csikszentmihalyi has interviewed more than 8,000 people on work, including a prolific 84-year-old inventor:

“He woke up every morning raring to go. He told me, `I’ve been working constantly since I was a kid, but I didn’t work a day in my life.’ These are the people that carve out their own work life, and they’re a pretty satisfied group.”

The message is clear: The problem isn’t work. It’s fulfillment. In Csikzentmihalyi’s study, people reported being in flow 54 percent of the time while working, but only 18 percent of the time during nonworking activities, such as watching TV. “Constantly look for ways to take a more artful approach to your job, master it until you can do it better than anybody, and then move on to a new challenge.”

For some, that means moving out of the corporation and into selfemployment. Others opt for jobs that pay less but give them more free time. Cheryl Heisler, for example, has clients willing to cut their incomes in half to gain more intrinsic rewards.

Rifkin views the long-term implications of the changing workplace in a global context. “The central issue facing every nation in the years ahead is what to do with the time and labor of millions of people who will no longer be needed to produce the goods and services they once did.”

The solution, he says, is the 30-hour workweek, and he makes a compelling case, citing the success at some European corporations, such as Volkswagen. It not only means more jobs for more people, but it gives workers, especially parents,- the time they so desperately need and want. An estimated 7 million children are home alone during some part of the day, and the loss of “family values” has been blamed for everything from the decline of our schools to violent crime. More jobs means reducing welfare, another political mandate. “This could be a powerful national crusade.”

The dawn of a new post-market era also means more people will be turning away from the private and public sectors and toward volunteerism - what Rifkin calls the “third sector.”

Not only does it provide satisfaction in a way that other jobs cannot, but it is the only sector that is expanding, Rifkin says. “It is the only area where technology can’t penetrate. … It means using all your skills, but using them for a totally different end.”