Brave New Idea: Work Should Be Fun

Thinking About Tomorrow: Reinventing Yourself at Midlife
by Susan Crandell

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It's a relatively recent concept that work should be fulfilling. In centuries past, most children moved into their parents' profession, whether it was farming, blacksmithing, or running the general store. Children born into work that engaged and satisfied them were lucky indeed. The freedom to choose a career is largely a twentieth-century development, and the thought that work should be rewarding, even fun, is still newer. The idea got traction in 1980 with the publication of the book Work Redesign, in which authors Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham maintained that to do a job well, people need to find their work meaningful.

Sometimes it isn't the work itself that disappoints, but the working conditions. Maybe that fourteen-year-old boy wasn't wrong when he dreamed of becoming an architect, but three decades later he finds his workday isn't spent solving design problems and sketching soaring skyscrapers, as he'd imagined. No, his commissions more often run to cookie-cutter-design Chinese restaurants in malls, and he puts in many hours dealing with staffing and budget issues, responding to clients' unrealistic expectations, and juggling an overload of work.

In the past two decades, technology has upped the ante on time pressure, creating what I call instant-itis. Remember the old Federal Express slogan, "When it absolutely, positively has to get there overnight"? These days, that would be the slow-boat service. Now that we have instant modes of communication, everything must be done instantly. Suddenly, even a fax becomes snail service; you've got to e-mail it, and you've got to e-mail it right now.

To compound the stress, there's no downtime anymore. In a world of beepers and BlackBerries, an increasing number of us are on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Even doctors, the classic example of "on all the time," unplug when a colleague is covering. In a recent poll of New Year's resolutions, several executives mentioned stepping away from their 24/7 addiction to BlackBerries and Treos. Many of us are asking ourselves: When did we sign up to be available to the office all the time? Wasn't that the deal we struck when we decided to become parents? Why is work suddenly oozing into our family time?

As I talked with boomers who've launched their own businesses, I realized that a big motivation to remake their careers was laying claim to their own time. Some found themselves working longer hours than they had in a corporate job, particularly during their fledgling firm's launch. But it was maximum hours with minimum stress because they approached their tasks with a new mind-set: They were in control, and they could decide when to knock off.

The New York Times reported that Americans now work an additional 172 hours a year, on average, than we did the year I graduated from college, 1973. In a survey by the Families and Work Institute, a nonprofit research group based in New York City, 37 percent of boomers said that they are chronically overworked, almost a third more than other age groups. Experts point to the high-level - and high-stress - jobs boomers are more likely to hold, as well as lifestyle issues we uniquely face, including caring for elderly parents and hosting boomerang kids who have moved back home as adults. Toss a Gen-X boss into the mix, and you've got Excedrin headache number 9-2-5 - the overwork special.

What happened to those innocent grammar school dreams, when we couldn't wait to be a firefighter or a nurse or an astronaut? How did work turn into an obligation rather than a joy?

Staging a Second Act That Shines

That question has led an unprecedented number of boomers to remake their work life. Some are launching businesses, some are telecommuting to tame the time crunch, others are boldly moving into new industries, still others are downshifting to part time. Traditionally, your forties and fifties are the decades when you've earned the right to coast a bit, to cut back on your work hours, let the younger go-getters carry the bulk of the load. I remember the early days of my career when the more senior you were, the earlier you left the office at the end of the day. But downsizing and increased productivity demands have canceled all that. Now many boomers are working harder at fifty-six than they did at twenty-six.

There's another factor that makes midlife an ideal time to initiate a big change. With more years of saving behind them, boomers have more resources to cushion a risky career move. Furthermore, with a lightening of day-to-day family responsibilities, they have more time to consider a new direction.

Volunteer as a firefighter. Learn a new skill, make new pals, help your community. Need I say more?

Ironically, that very same time-served/money-in-the-bank phenomenon can make it harder to summon the courage to reinvent a career. At this stage, with two or three decades invested in a chosen field, there's a lot at stake. When you're young, it's relatively easy to opt for a big switch. In the 1990s, when the dot-com craze was exploding, I lost several talented young editors to Internet jobs. As one of them said to me, "I may be crazy, but how can I not take this chance at twenty-five, when I'm single and have no family responsibilities? I have no one to answer to but me." For her, the risk didn't feel that big; if she needed to make a U-turn back to magazines, there were a lot of jobs at her level. But for someone in a senior position, the kind you work decades to get, it's a much bigger deal to throw it all over in pursuit of a dream.

Nevertheless, more and more boomers are doing just that, seeking work that really speaks to their soul. In talking with people for this book, over and over I heard them say, "I needed to find something that felt right for me, at the deepest level." For some, discovering work that resonates was possible only now: It had taken them forty or fifty years to truly know themselves. They gloried in their strengths, understood their limitations, had logged enough life experiences to know what would be satisfying.

Copyright © 2007 by Susan Crandell

About the Author

I got my first job after college not because I was the smartest applicant - I wasn't - but because I was the only one with a pilot's license. I'll be grateful forever to Bob Parke for hiring me at Flying magazine because that's where I met the love of my life, Stephan Wilkinson (the author of two wonderful books, The Gold-Plated Porsche and Man and Machine). Thirty years later, Steve and I are still working together, both freelance writers with offices in our little Hudson Valley farmhouse. Our daughter Brook, who's an editor at Conde Nast Traveler, is the only one with a real job.