Great Article On Burnout And Jobs

While in the barber shop waiting room today I read this article, “Can’t Get No Satisfaction” by Jennifer Senior published in the 12/04/06 edition of New York magazine.

While the article focuses on burnout in the workforce, I think they missed the mark in some respects as this same burnout can happen with unpaid volunteer work, parenting, homeschooling, and dare I say with “retirement”? All the same issues still apply, it is just that they are not burned out on the thing that pays money to do.

This article mentions at some point the New York City pace of life. I grew up in New Haven County, Connecticut. While my own family was not of this pace my father was a work-a-holic. He had a 9-5 Monday-Friday job with no work to do after hours for that. However he did fill his evenings with unpaid work, renovating the entire house, for example, and many ‘do it yourself’ projects kept him busy every night of the week and on weekends. Also he did some ‘side jobs’ on weekends. He has a very good work ethic. However with that said we did not have what today’s ‘modern father’ has recommended to him. For example, I’d not say we had much ‘quality time’ nor did we just play together, we didn’t travel as a family and we were not open communicators or affection-show-er’s in our immediate family.

Despite my own family not having that New York City white collar career drive thing happening, it was the culture that I was aware of as a teenager, through school, primarily. I saw it firsthand in the workforce when I began working part time at age 17 and continuing through to the day that I resigned from my job/career to be a mother at home. I am now literally surrounded by people that fit exactly into what is being described in this article. Also my husband had a Wall Street type job working in Manhattan, so I have lived that pace of life as the spouse. If life is being lived some other way in America today I am not aware of it; I thought it was like this everywhere (please correct me if I am wrong).

Here are some great quotes from the long article. All quotes are in blue font, sorry I am having trouble with Bloggers formatting for quotes for the indentation function, so I can't use that.

“My clients are perfectionists,” says Alden Cass, a therapist to both corporate attorneys and men on Wall Street. He’s young, about the age of a hungry broker, and he looks like the men he treats—strong features, dark teased hair, Turnbull & Asser striped shirt, nice watch. “They have very rigid ideals in terms of win-lose,” he continues. “Their expectations of success are through the roof, and when their reality doesn’t match up with their expectations, it leads to burnout—they leave no room for error or failure at all in their formula.”

The same issue can pertain to parenting and homeschooling and to volunteer work.

"…there’s a gulf between what they expected from their jobs and what they got. “I can’t tell you,” he says, “how many people come into my office and ask, ‘How come I have this money and I can’t find happiness?’ ”
So what does he tell them? “That happiness equals reality divided by expectations.”

Again the same issue can pertain to homeschooling, parenting, volunteer work, etc.

"And Farber often calls burnout “the gap between expectation and reward,” which may have the most relevance to New Yorkers. This has always been a city of inflated expectations. People with more modest aims for themselves seem less prone to disillusionment. "

I am surrounded with people with high aims. Is anyone in America living without high aims today?

And who ever said the high aims have only to do with paid employment? There are a lot of issues that having high aims brings that have nothing to do with the part of our lives that is the paying job part.

The article also discusses burnout in the ‘caring professions’. If you want to read about burned out school teachers, the article covers that topic, too And my recent discussions about social service agency workers is also covered here, with burnout affecting them as well, and that will impact their ability to do their job well (for the worse).

Here are some interesting research findings about age and burnout, and disillusionment notions.
"In her early work, for instance, Maslach found that younger people burn out more often than older people, a finding that turns up again and again both here and abroad. (In fact, that study from the University of Michigan explicitly said that younger surgeons burn out more quickly than older ones.) This conclusion may seem counterintuitive, because we associate burning out somehow with midlife disillusionment. But not if we think of burnout as the gap between expectations and rewards. Older workers, as it turns out, have more perspective and more experience; it’s the young idealists who go flying into a profession, plumped full of high hopes, and run full-speed into a wall. "

And here is something about marriage and whether the employee has children or not, which is SO interesting.

"Maslach also found that married people burn out less often than single people, as long as their marriages are good, because they don’t depend as much on their jobs for fulfillment And childless people, though unburdened by the daily strains of parenting, tend to burn out far more than people with kids. (This, too, has been found across cultures; in the Netherlands, a recent survey by the Bureau of Statistics showed that twice as many working women without children showed symptoms of burnout as did working women with underage children.) It’s much easier to disproportionately invest emotional and physical capital in the office if you have nowhere else to put it. And the office seldom loves you back. "

The Sandwich Generation was addressed also.

“I did a study in the south of Israel of ‘sandwich generation’ couples—people who have young children and elderly parents,” says Ayala Pines, the Israeli researcher. “This is very stressful, but what I found is that these people were not that burned out at all, because their families also provided emotional support.”

I will say that reading that surprised me as I personally feel that the sandwich generation thing is very difficult to manage, speaking from my own experience with it. In fact not only do I deal with the issue of my own parents but I worry about and help out in various ways with my two still-alive grandmothers! I cannot imagine what it must be like if a woman is of the sandwich generation and is working full time in her career that would put me over the top---it is hard enough to deal with the issues when I don’t have the job issues to complicate matters.

I loved this part about the New York mindset (which is also prevalent in my Fairfield County, Connecticut, where many of the New York workers live).

"Pines’s work has also shown that people in fiercely individualist societies are more prone to burn out. “I once did a study comparing Mexican college professors to American college professors,” she says. “The Mexican burnout rate was lower. To them, the kind of lifestyle you describe in New York is insane. "

And this was surprising, the idea that our living in a society where we feel physically safe makes us feel that our lives are less significant. That is amazing. I guess it makes sense that if we lived in an area where our basic survival was at risk all the time that we’d be more grateful for just living through each day! When we live in abundance it seems so easy to find the tiniest thing to complain about.

In my first and last family Christmas newsletter in 2001 I complained about the intrusion in our family life with my husband’s then-new Blackberry. I was chastised by my father in law for saying that. However here is a quote from the article which backs up my issue.

"One has to wonder whether the developments of a high-speed world haven’t made burnout worse. First, the obvious: With the advent of e-mail, cell phones, laptops, BlackBerrys (or “CrackBerrys”—the argot here seems extremely apt), and other bits of high-speed doodadry, it has become virtually impossible, in senses both literal and metaphorical, to unplug from our jobs. As Schaufeli, the Dutch researcher, notes, one of the strongest predictors of burnout isn’t just work overload but “work-home interference”—a sociologist’s way of saying we’re receiving phone calls from Tokyo during dinner and replying to clients on our BlackBerrys while making our children brush their teeth."

I didn’t like the idea that just because my husband was able to be reached 24/7 that everything, even the most minor and unimportant issue was expected to be addressed immediately. Even if we were in bed trying to go to sleep, even if he was driving down the road, even if we were in a public place or trying to enjoy a special celebration (a birthday party, a wedding, etc.).

And then, hooray—the article addresses the general notion of being overly busy, something I talk about all the time!

“Busyness”—a homophone of business, which cannot be an accident—has become the defining sensation of city life. If busy meant “fulfilled,” or “engaged,” that’d be one thing, but it seems, in most cases, to mean “overloaded” or “frazzled.” In Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, James Gleick points out that doctors and sociologists even have a name for this harried sensation: “hurry sickness.”

What a great article.

Now the question is what in our society will change? I bet nothing will change or slow down except if individual people are able to disconnect themselves or to say ‘no’, to slow down their schedules and things like that.

Lastly I think the problem lies in the fact that some people are misled to think that the purpose of life is to work for money. While money is necessary to live in America it is not the REASON to live. The problem is that even if an excellent job performance is done, there is not always a completely fulfilling sensation to follow that. I think the problem is that some people expect more out of their work than is realistic.

I think what happens also is that sometimes people get overly invested in their jobs and they have unrealistic expectations of what working at that job is supposed to do for their lives, for them personally. A job rarely will give a person a feeling of wholeness and it rarely gives LONG term happiness and fulfillment. Perhaps the issue is that some people look to jobs to provide spiritual fulfillment and I don’t think that a job can always provide that. Even if a person is an Atheist and even if they are a happy Atheist I wonder how many find that spiritual fulfillment through (just) their job.

And in closing let’s remember how many unhappy people there are in America (regardless of their religious beliefs). There are a lot of people going through the motions of life who feel dead inside. There are a lot of people whose lives look great to outsiders but who are miserable and feel unfulfilled inside.

I don’t think I have the answers to solve everyone’s problems but this article did back up some of what I already thought and it gave me even more to think about.

Technorati Tags: burnout, busyness, over-scheduled, quality of life, employment.