When I turned 18 and people asked me what I planned for the future, I usually said something like, “Eat, sleep, maybe go for a walk.” It was my deflection of that tiresome question older folks ask young folks who are entering adulthood. But the deflection also reflected my beliefs. At 18, I really had no plans and no intention of developing any. My favorite TV character in childhood was Maynard G. Krebs, Dobie Gillis’ ersatz beatnik friend. If you’ve never seen The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, watch almost any episode on YouTube, and you’ll meet Maynard. He’s the only reason to watch the show which is, otherwise, another late-1950s, dopey, teen-angst sitcom. Whenever Maynard heard the word, “work,” he always showed a viscerally negative reaction as he repeated the word while his voice jumped an octave and his face displayed a mixture of shock and consternation. My pre-pubescent mind thought that was the perfect response. I’m sure the show’s producers didn’t intend for the audience to see that caricature as positive. They likely expected that the audience would see him as a shiftless ne’er do well; but I thought of him as a role model.
By the time I was supposed to enter adulthood, I was content to follow Maynard’s example and play a little music with friends, hang out, organize a rally or music event now and then, eat, sleep, and maybe go for a walk. I lived in a commune for a while, but that became too much work when we’d have hours-long meetings about the dishwashing schedule and whether drying them afterward would spread more germs than letting them air dry. It’s when I realized that meetings could be more laborious than physical toil. I left the commune and enrolled in a junior college and then found that I could hitchhike to the beach after classes. With time, I realized that I could just bypass the college and thumb a ride directly to the beach. I didn’t see any reason to stay enrolled in college to go to the beach, so I stopped attending classes midway through that first semester. For a good part of that year after I left high school, I successfully sidestepped anything that resembled work.
However, by the latter part of the year after I turned 18, I started to feel to the pull of adulthood. As an adult, especially a male adult in that era, everything around me demanded that I needed to be productive and striving. I needed a job to pay bills, and that required that I modify my aversion to work and take a job as a warehouseman. That left less time for strolls and more time that my boss demanded that I be at work. To keep the job, I had to be consistently there, and I needed to perform tasks as well as those around me. If I didn’t go to work on any day, that meant others would have to do my share – something my co-workers, all middle-aged men with families and mortgages, made certain I understood wasn’t acceptable. So I showed up and worked and learned how to be a good warehouseman. And I experienced the unexpected. With time, work became interesting and eventually enjoyable.
I could challenge myself to master tasks and feel good about that mastery. Driving a forklift quickly and efficiently required some artistry, as did stacking loads onto trucks for delivery or learning how to drive those delivery trucks. To this day, I still use a flying dutchman knot to snugly secure any truck or trailer load. It was interesting to learn new skills, and it felt artful as I constantly adapted new ideas to perform better. By my 19th year, I began to evolve a different viewpoint that I kept throughout my adult years until I retired. Instead of work being a pejorative, it became one of the defining purposes to my life as working gave me purpose and direction, especially later as I became a teacher and adapted my developed sense of work as artistry to teaching. I reversed from my Maynard G. Krebs-inspired perspective. These days, I’m in the phase of life when going to the beach instead of contributing productively is a societally acceptable approach to any day. But now looking back, I wonder if I went wrong in completely abandoning my childhood views on work.
I now review my employed life of 46 years, three months, and 27 days and question the value of the many weeks, months, and years when I worked 60 or 70 hours a week. It’s a pace that I began when I finally attended college in my mid-20s, and I worked full time while taking classes full time. Once I graduated, I always had reasons to work a side job, take on additional work, operate a side business, or maintain an active consulting practice. I was that teacher who built an after-school drama program, or advised all the school’s publications, or served on multiple committees, or taught in-service classes to other teachers. I was the one who went on to a master’s degree in summers and evenings, and eventually a doctorate to build more skills and knowledge. I constantly found new challenges and new opportunities to engage me, and that meant long hours of working.
When people asked me whether I felt any stress, I always laughed and answered “no.” I really believed that. Retrospectively, I now realize that I’d gotten so habituated to stress in my daily life that it felt normal to experience the pressure of time and task. It wasn’t until a year after I retired that I understood what living stress-free felt like again. Like the frog in the pan of water, I never knew that the water reached well past the boiling point. But it’s not just me. I think this is the experience of many workers. We just feel the drive to work and don’t see what work’s dominance means to our lives.
Workers in the U.S. are among the most productive on the planet. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development’s annual surveys, in 2021 we were sixth in number of hours worked per GDP; we were third in GDP per person worked. We were also first in total number of hours worked per worker. The average amount of paid leave that a U.S. employee is given in a year is among the lowest among developed nations. Workers in the U.S., regardless of their income levels or education, weekly work much harder and longer than their counterparts in other developed countries. We seem to take a perverse pride in our overwork. We’ve bought into what social scientist Max Weber coined as the “Protestant work ethic” in the early 20th Century. That idea came from an extreme Calvinism that valued work above all else and claimed saintly rewards to all who arrange their lives accordingly. It’s all led to a simplistic bifurcated calculation: Not working is slothful and sinful, so working especially hard must be virtuous. Actually, that polarization should’ve been my first clue that something was amiss because I know that binary choices are typically false choices.
And what’s the real reward for a life spent working? It can’t be the ways in which I’m remembered – what people call “legacy.” Now almost six years after I left the job where I retired, I’m guessing most of the people who now work there wouldn’t recognize me if I walked into the building. A good number of others would need a second to remember my name – even though I was there a decade prior to my retirement. Not much of a “legacy.” It’s critical to note that’s neither good nor bad. It’s just the way things are. To tell the truth, I’d have to think hard about those people’s names if I saw them. I’ve maintained some relationships from my final job, but those are relationships that continued outside of the work we did. In those relationships, we hardly ever talk about that work. Life goes forward and the friendships that lasted are the real legacy – not the work.
For American workers, the real rewards of their overworking habits are, as sociologist Juliet Schor suggests, a shorter lifespan, more stress-related illnesses, and a more unhappy workforce than many other developed nations. We’ve sold ourselves on the importance of work and have forgotten the importance of life. I understand that some folks don’t have an option. If you need to work two jobs to make ends meet, you don’t have the choice but to overwork. But for people who don’t have to have two or more jobs, and to the employers who implicitly or explicitly demand and reward the behavior, that compunction to work seems misplaced.
I’m incredibly fortunate that I’ve now been retired long enough that I’ve been able to rediscover life outside of working. I maintain some professional interests while conducting some research, consulting on a few projects, and writing professionally. But those are now secondary to playing music or tinkering or just hanging out – living the life I admired Maynard G. Krebs for living. Others may not have that chance. There’s no guarantee that people will live as long as I have and still have the ability to enjoy retirement and live as I now do. I know far too many people who reached my age without the capacity to do what they enjoy doing, and I know as many who didn’t live long enough to retire. I also know some who’ve come to retirement and realized that they don’t know how to do anything besides work. According to the CDC, In 2020, the median expected lifespan of a child born in the U.S. was 76.4 years, a reduction from 78.8 years the year before that. It’s too early to tell if that decline is a trend. But the truth is that if the median lifespan remains the same, increases, or decreases, life is finite.
Given the finite, it seems to me that spending 40 or 50 years without nurturing your inner Maynard G. Krebs is a mistake. Beginning in 2020, as people lived through the pandemic, I heard from multiple friends and colleagues who were still working and came to that realization. As a result, they left jobs or changed positions or pursued new opportunities that allowed them the time to live outside of working. That gives me some hope. Maybe more people will discover their Maynard-ness while they still have time. Maybe that’ll be you. And maybe you’ll make more time to enjoy a good meal, sleep, or just go for a walk.
