One of the articles I thought might be interesting is called “Why Are You Rushing?” by Arlie Russell Hochschild, a sociology professor at Berkeley. For a minute I thought it would be about slowing down, but the subtitle includes, “What are you chasing after? And what would it take to make us rest?” Then I realized this article probably wouldn’t help me solve anything, it would just help me identify a behavior (identification of bad behaviors is always important, yes, but after you’ve identified them, you’ve got to move on, right?).
Sure enough, this article is about workaholics and why are people workaholics. Some are addicted to the adrenaline rush. Some feel pressure to provide the income at home or support at work. Some people prefer being at work because they aren’t appreciated at home, that sort of thing.
A couple of interesting points though: If we work more, we think we’ll be rewarded for it (though I have to say that this was published before 9/11 and when we finally started feeling less loyalty to employers–although there’s the flip side, with fearing losing your job, so you work even more to show your worth). Not always true. Plus, overworked people tend to buy things that they’d do, “if they only had time.” When we surround ourselves with all this gear, (a) we’ve wasted money, and (b) they’re just reminders of what we’d rather be doing, and that can be depressing.
The sidebar talks about how different readers would spend an extra hour, if there were 25 hours in a day. The introduction says, “If you’re always too busy doing what needs to be done, you can avoid thinking about what you want. The freedom to choose, it sometimes seems, can be dizzying, too scary to embrace.” I can identify with this because I’ve spent far too many years doing what I think I should do, or trying to please other people. You fill up the empty space with stuff–and in this scenario, you can fill empty time with extra work or chores. Now I’m learning to do what I want to do–I find it takes up more hours of the day. I certainly don’t accomplish as much as I want to, but I’m much happier and far less stressed out than I used to be.
