The Future of Success (29 page)

In short, you work harder than a typical European or Japanese works, in large part because work is organized and rewarded in America in a manner that induces harder work: There’s more uncertainty, wider inequality, more sorting, and more intense competition. You also work harder than you used to work, because in all these respects the stakes have become higher. Young people in college are more interested in being well off financially than they used to be because the potential financial rewards are greater than they were years ago, and the consequences of failing to pursue financial well-being are more onerous. Adults are more intent on children’s learning to work hard for the same reason. People are choosing to have fewer children because paid work is crowding children out. Where you reside and with whom you join have larger consequences than before because the sorting mechanism is more efficient.

Of course, the choice is still up to you. No one is
requiring
you to work so hard for pay or to dedicate so much concentration and emotional energy to it. You could choose, if you wished, to work less, and have more left over for yourself, friends, family, and community. You could decide to have more kids and not to subcontract their care. You could choose against buying personal attention for yourself, including “friends” in the form of coaches and counselors. You could choose to live in a poorer community than the best you can afford to buy into.

On one level, these are all your personal choices. But at another level, they are not really personal choices at all, because the advantages of working harder for pay and the disadvantages of not doing so, as well as the benefits and the costs of living in one community or another, are larger today than they used to be, and larger in America than in many other countries. You don’t have to scale the wall, but the consequence of not doing so is harsher, and the reward for doing so is sweeter, than you have ever encountered before. And both the harshness and the sweetness are intensifying.

This is not to suggest that you abandon all personal effort to achieve a better “balance” between work and the rest of your life. It’s only to warn you that any such wholly personal pursuit will require greater fortitude now than it did years ago, and if the trends discussed in this book continue, even greater determination in the future. Repeatedly we’re told, or we tell ourselves, that “balance” is within our grasp if only we become better aware of what’s truly important to us, or if we better manage our time, or if we simplify our lives. These are noble aspirations, but we deceive ourselves if we believe that such approaches will resolve the anxieties of this prosperous age. To view what is happening to us and what we can do about it as private matters divorced from the larger trends in our economy and society is to miss much of the truth, and to limit our range of options unnecessarily.

SELF-AWARENESS

By all means, become more aware of what’s truly important to you. Many of us know more about how we’re doing on the job than about how we’re doing in the rest of our lives. Job performance is constantly rated, evaluated, and appraised. We know our economic worth with ever-greater exactitude, because our paychecks now rise or fall to reflect it. If our star is rising, we get performance bonuses, stock options, and better job offers; if falling, our pay package shrinks. Yet the quality of the rest of our lives often eludes appraisal. Off the job, we’re not nearly as sure of what’s expected of us or what we should expect of ourselves. We may have a vague and uneasy sense that something’s lacking, but how do we recognize what doesn’t exist?

Society as a whole suspects that something is awry when it’s shocked by events like children in an upscale suburb opening fire on other children at school. Such events are sadly expected in poor inner-city schools, but not in tony, carefully sorted suburbs. For a time, pundits, preachers, and politicians wonder publicly if our values are wrong, if we lack “balance” in our lives, if we’re failing to spend enough time and energy on the “important things,” such as our children. Then the crisis subsides, the headlines disappear, and we all go back to paid work, often more frenzied than before.

Many women are fully aware that their lives are becoming tightly compressed, but they’re confused about what they (and others) should expect from themselves. Most of them continue to bear the major responsibility for taking care of children, a husband or male partner, and elderly relatives, as well as maintaining the home, even when they have full-time jobs.
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Some feel they have to work even harder on the job to preserve what they consider to be an adequate standard of living; others feel they have to work harder if they want to stay on the fast track—cultivating connections, keeping up to speed in their fields. Today’s woman is fortunate if she can squeeze into her day everything she feels she has an obligation to do. Her painful discovery is how often she cannot.

For many men, the painful discovery comes when something in their lives explodes. It may be their marriage, or their health, or their child who suddenly gets in trouble. Or it happens when their job begins to demand so much that they wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. Or when their job becomes so rewarding that they suddenly discover the other parts of their life have all but disappeared. (That’s what happened to me.)

Is there a more reliable way to become aware of the implicit choices we’re making? Do we have to await a painful discovery? Recently I spent the better part of two weeks poring over some of the burgeoning self-help books, audiocassettes, home-study courses, newsletters, and guides for finding a “better balance” between paid work and the rest of life.

One recommended technique is to make lists or draw graphs representing what you most like or dislike about your life right now, or list what’s most and least important, and then reflect on what you’re actually spending your time on or devoting energies to. What have you allowed to become your priorities despite your resolve that they aren’t or shouldn’t be? A macabre version of the exercise is to imagine yourself nearing death, pondering what your life’s priorities should have been. What will you look back upon that was most and least important? What would you want your legacy to be? How would you wish people to remember you? Then compare this to how you’re actually living. I’m repeatedly assured by these guides, although I cannot find reliable statistics to support the assurances, that no one on his deathbed regrets spending too little time at the office.

These exercises in self-reflection are not harmful, and they may do some good. The basic point of all of them is simple: We’re always making a choice, although we may prefer to deny we have choices; we might not want to accept the trade-offs they imply. When I worked in Washington, I didn’t want to acknowledge that my life outside work was disappearing, because I loved the job so much that I didn’t dare think about what it was taking away from me. Yet I was choosing just the same. The people who buy the books or the audiotapes, who enroll in support groups and consult with personal coaches, have already reflected enough to decide that something in their lives must change. The far harder part comes in deciding exactly what to change, and then actually following through.

TIME MANAGEMENT

Some people try to manage their time better. They buy into another small industry of time-management books, audiotapes, guides, coaches, and groups. Ever since the management-efficiency expert Frederick Winslow Taylor’s time-and-motion studies in the first decades of the twentieth century, it’s been assumed that human activity can be made more efficient by eliminating unnecessary steps. For starters, calculate precisely what you do in a typical day, breaking every task into measurable units. Make a “time diary.”

Next, analyze the typical day. Note where you’re spending too much time and where too little, according to your ideal priorities. What can be efficiently compressed in order to make room for expansion elsewhere? Three hours for e-mail, yet only twenty-two minutes with your son and thirty with your wife (not counting dinner prep)? That’s out of whack. Cut e-mail down to two hours, and give your son and your wife thirty more minutes each. You’re out of contact with your friends, so cut thirty minutes out of random chats at work and add thirty at the end of the day for phone calls to friends outside work. And what happened to your resolve to get more involved in the community? Make time for that. By the way, you’re not getting nearly enough sleep. So cut an hour off meetings (you’re sleeping through some of them anyway), and add an hour to bed. Add some exercise.

It didn’t work. It’s easy to decide what to devote less time to, but nearly impossible to stick to the new schedule. I know someone who has a small digital timer attached to his belt that vibrates whenever he’s supposed to move on to his next event. I don’t believe he has become more efficient, but he has definitely become more jittery.

One problem is that work doesn’t present new opportunities and crises only when you block out time for them. This is especially true in the emerging economy, which is nothing if not a series of fresh surprises. Fierce competition and constant innovation inevitably give rise to things that can’t be planned for in advance—a client with a crisis, a “killer app” from a competitor, a key employee on the verge of defecting. The more responsibility you have—the closer you are to the tumult—the less control you have over demands that will be made on your work time.

Another problem is that the actual time devoted to paid work is only one of its compressing forces. There’s also the emotional energy and psychological concentration it requires.

Finally, the other people to whom you may want to relate outside of paid work—the very people who may have been shortchanged because of it—don’t respond on a precise timetable. A spouse doesn’t share intimate thoughts or feelings on a prearranged schedule. One of the best things about an intimate relationship is its spontaneity. Dedicating a specific unit of time to it is like trying to store a puppy in a box. Keep it in there too long, even with adequate food and water, and you take the life out of it.

Children don’t operate on a fixed schedule either. While I know nothing about raising girls, I can tell you with authority that boys don’t function by itinerary. As I’ve noted elsewhere, teenage boys are like clamshells. They open up just for a moment, in order to take in a little nourishment or expel some dirt. But then they clam up tight again. If you’re around when they open up, you have a chance to see something wondrous inside. And you have a quick chance to connect.

But you have to be there for the moment. The clam shuts in an instant, and then you can’t see or do a thing. Forget what you’ve heard about “quality time.” Teenage boys don’t want it, can’t use it, have better things to do. When I came home from Bill Clinton’s cabinet and suddenly had weekend time to spare, I waited for one of my boys to take me up on my offer of hours of quality time with them. “Sorry, Dad. I’d really like to go to the game with you, but .         .         . well, you see, David and Jim and I are going to hang out in the Square.” “That’s a cool movie, Dad, but .         .         . well, to tell you the truth, I’d rather see it with Diane.” I suggested we make a plan, mark our calendars. But when the time came, there was always someone or something else. Teenage boys can’t be scheduled.

SIMPLICITY

Some people decide to simplify their lives. There’s even a “voluntary simplicity” movement that comes with yet another set of how-to books, conferences, newsletters, and support groups. The basic idea is as simple as the espoused goal. The jacket on one recent book in the series says it all: “Less—less work, less rushing, less debt—is more—more time with families and friends, more time with community, more time with nature.”
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First, decide how much money (or power or status) you really need. Can you do with a smaller house? Fewer restaurant meals? Less
stuff?
Assuming you can, cut back on the work you do for no reason other than to generate more of those things. Live more simply, and have more life left over.

These books remind me of diet plans. They view acquisitiveness like a compulsive eating disorder. The stuff you buy but don’t need is like the food your body can’t absorb, which turns into fat cells. Unless you want to become as big as a house, you have to cut back and stick to the diet. Discipline those yearnings. There’s even the equivalent of a twelve-step diet plan for simplifying your life, and support groups to help you keep your resolve.