A Wild and Precious Life
Last Sunday, coming off a week of vacation, I wrote that “I find it hard at times to remind myself that vacations are good.” I was referring to the undercurrent of anxiety I tend to feel when I’m not moving and being productive.
Let me say something before I get into this: I am not a workaholic, or anything remotely close to one. If you’re reading this and wondering what the hell the guy who reads for pleasure all day is talking about, you’re not crazy. I have plenty of time to relax and I take full advantage of it.
But I’m not interested in why we relax when we’re given the opportunity. I’m interested in how work became our default priority and personal lives a secondary concern. How it is that we dedicate so much time and effort to career – career planning, career advancement, career satisfaction – and almost none to those equivalent parts of our personal lives?
This idea had been on my mind for a while, but I struggled to articulate it until I read this in The Atlantic a few weeks ago:
“As I once found myself confessing to a close friend, ‘I would prefer to be special than happy.’ He asked why. ‘Anyone can do the things it takes to be happy—going on vacation with family, relaxing with friends … but not everyone can accomplish great things.’ My friend scoffed at this, but I started asking other people in my circles and found that I wasn’t unusual. Many of them had made the success addict’s choice of specialness over happiness.”
Here is a personal example. When I graduated college, I worked as an analyst at a large energy company in Baltimore. I was making somewhere in the range of $55,000. If I had done nothing other than stay with the company as an average analyst, I would be making something like $65,000-$75,000 today. If I had been above average enough to get promoted on the traditional path, I’d be making $75,000-$85,000.
By all measures, I had everything in that job that I needed to be happy. I had a big room in a townhouse that I shared with three friends. I had a car, and could have easily afforded a new one if I’d wanted. I was within a twenty minute drive of my parents, my sister, my grandfather, and my closest cousins. I had enough money to take multiple international trips each year.
And the intangibles? I worked 50 hour weeks, but could have easily stuck to the bare minimum and gotten my work done effectively. I walked to work, or rode a free bus for fifteen minutes when it was too hot or cold. I had friends in the office that made my day-to-day stimulating and enjoyable.
No sane person could have looked at that and said that I was lacking anything.
But the truth is I felt like I was lacking something. The job didn’t have the progression I wanted or that I felt I deserved. It was a “dead end,” which is what we call many jobs that check all the boxes except our desire to be special.
Now, this isn’t a knock on ambition. Ambition and happiness are not mutually exclusive. I’m an ambitious guy and that’s not going away.
But it is a criticism of how we frame ambition and success. We devalue personal life and overvalue careers. We look down on the person who lacks a shiny LinkedIn profile, without thinking about the accomplishments lurking off the page. There’s no spot in a resume for “devoted granddaughter” or “life of the party,” but that doesn’t make them any less important than “co-founder.”
With a career first mentality, we make trade-offs that we might not otherwise choose:
- Should I run/bike to work?
- Career First: No, I don’t want to be that sweaty guy in the office
- Happiness First: Yes, I love to exercise and want to start the day off right
- Should I take an hour break for lunch?
- Career First: No, I can eat at my desk and get more done
- Happiness First: Yes, I want to get closer to the people I spend 40 hours a week with
- Should I sign off at 6 o’clock?
- Career First: No, there is more work to do and no one else is going home
- Happiness First: Yes, I want to spend time with my friends/parents/partner/kids
My hope is that one of the positives to come from COVID is that we put more thought into these trade-offs. Not that we toss our ambition to the side and sit on the couch all day, but that we spend more time reflecting on how we want to design our lives. As Mary Oliver puts it:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
It’s a much needed re-calibration.
COVID Thoughts
If COVID were a 50 mile race, then we seem to be at the 25 mile mark. We’re picking our heads up after covering a respectable distance and realizing how long we have left to go. And having just covered that same distance, we know the next 25 miles are going to suck.
I’ve had a lot of conversations, particularly at work, that begin with “back when I thought this would only be temporary…” and that gets to the mid-marathon phenomenon. If Happiness = Reality > Expectations, it’s no surprise we’re struggling with a reality that is so much worse than our early expectations.
And the mental health toll is real. Between Q2 2019 and Q2 2020, the CDC reports a threefold increase in symptoms of anxiety and a fourfold increase in symptoms of depression, all more pronounced among “younger adults, racial/ethnic minorities, essential workers, and unpaid adult caregivers.”
Even without seeing the jumps from prior periods, the graphic below is alarming:
Those numbers guarantee that somebody you or I know has been suffering at some point during this. And unlike the CDC, who explicitly survey respondents, we don’t often ask our friends how they are feeling with any genuine expectation that they will really tell us.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how infrequently “we” – by which I primarily mean millennial men – engage in open and honest dialogue about our mental health. It’s a much bigger subject, for another day, but this data is a reminder that all of us should be asking ourselves:
- How am I making myself available for friends who are struggling?
- How am I conveying that I want to hear all of what’s going on, not just the pleasantries?
There have been three distinct occasions in my life when I have consciously made myself available in this way, and all three times I was ashamed by how little I knew about what my friends were going through. We’re all stuck in more insidious thoughts loops than normal, and an occasional “how are you feeling with everything going on?” goes a long way.
Windows
I’ve been staying in a sidewalk facing, basement apartment in Portland, Oregon since this past Sunday. You hear a lot in a setup like mine, particularly when the apartment is across the street from a supermarket loading dock. All week I’ve been woken up by the sound of beeping trucks and shouting men.
This Thursday I was surprised to see hundreds of people lining the sidewalk on both sides of my block, waiting to receive financial relief from a distribution office across the street. People were laughing and playing music; one guy brought around a big bag of ice and tried to sell cups of it to strangers; another called a friend to see if the wait across town was any shorter. Six hours in, patience had been stretched a bit thin – “we’ve been waiting in line all f*cking day, man, get to the back!” – but in general everyone just seems happy to get help.
It was one of the few real examples I’ve had of the pandemic’s toll since this whole thing started and a good reminder of how governments should step in during a crisis (it was for local relief).
This week Annie Lowry wrote this about GoFundMe during the pandemic and I think it relates well:
“People who are sick, poor, unemployed – these are the people we task with writing up a heartrending story and going hat-in-hand online.”
Side note: My website is being incredibly slow, and is exposing how little I know/understand about web design and troubleshooting. If you want to read my new short story (below), just be a bit patient with the load time!
– Emmett
Recent Posts:
Ghosted – Some guys never learn
What I’m Reading:
The Glory of the Roll Call – Anne Helen Peterson
The Democrats Miss the Meaning – Peggy Noonan, WSJ
Anti-Racist Arguments Are Tearing People Apart – Conor Friedersdorf
What I’m Listening To:
Financial Blunders to Financial Buff: How Farnoosh Torabi’s Money History Grew Her Career – Bigger Pockets Money Podcast