“Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.”
—Sophocles
The curse of the advice giver is to find himself saying the same things over and over. I am an advice giver, giving advice to public speakers from rookies to senators, scientists to ministers, CEOs to little old ladies. But even with my wide clientele, I got bored. It wasn’t because my clientele were boring–far from it. It was because I was burning out, and I didn’t know it.
I needed to go off piste, which is a skiing term that in my case means, “I don’t like doing the same thing over and over,” and in your case, “Skiing in the backcountry, where, if you fall or get lost or freeze, or run into an avalanche, you have a greater chance of dying.”
My psychological profile is, “I would rather be terrified than bored,” and I was wiped out, nasty, and incapable of recharging myself for a long time.
Jill Lepore in The New Yorker says that burnout is, “To be used up like a battery so depleted that it can’t be recharged.” She defines the symptoms of burnout as, “Exhaustion, cynicism, and loss of efficacy.”
Yup, that’s me.
By early April 2020 it was clear my business was in trouble, as was I. Work as I knew it would no longer be possible, or at least not possible for a long time. Getting people together around a table would be as antiquated as a buggy whip, a Pogo Stick, a HulaHoop.
Suddenly it was all about Zoom, getting green screens, donning headphones, gearing up, feeding Amazon mountains of cash.
And yet there I was, like a beached whale, barely able to move my body. I laid myself out on the front lawn and battled the goat weed that chokes the garden beds on my property. It was wonderful, living in the dirt.
Think about this. Everyone will be in far flung places, porting themselves into little pod rooms. Each person will have their own device and their own backdrops–the kind of backdrops TV shows have– because now everyone who has any moola can be on TV!
And, of course, I am not happy about this. I’m not up for it. Instead, I’m lying on the lawn weeding. It’s change. Even now I am still burnt out, and it’s September 2021. I am told I have to pull my feet out of the mud, where me and my company have been planted for 25 years. Suddenly, I am supposed to get gritty, resilient, and innovative.
My friend, Tom Iglehart, said, “From now on it’s all about your virtual presence.” My first thought was, “What the hell is virtual presence?” I mean, how can you be present virtually? Are you almost or nearly, or kind of, but not really present?
He quoted verbatim Ted Carpenter, the friend of Marshall McLuhan, who said: “We are as angels, and we might as well get used to it.”
I think Tom interprets that remark to mean that just as angels suddenly appear in many religious traditions, we mere mortals are also destined to be similarly masterful, able to appear at the proper moment, winnowing the air.
For those of you who are not familiar with Marshall McLuhen, he was the high priest of pop culture and metaphysician of media in the late sixties and seventies. He was famous for saying, “The media is the message,” and in one short paragraph said, “I must stress again that societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media with which men communicate than by the content of the communication.”
In other words, the machines are driving us.
He also said, “All media, from the phonetic alphabet to the computer, are extensions of man that cause deep and lasting changes in him.”
Let’s think about the possible changes, good and bad.
The good is that we woke up to the fact that we did not have to be in the office all the time, that we could loosen up, and work on the honor system. We did not have to get on airplanes and fly to client meetings. We saved money. We got to see our kids more. Mom and Dad could stay at home to work, just like their ancestors who might have worked on the family farm.
The bad comes from Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford economist, who suggests that high-earning workers will weather the storm and even grow their careers. But low-earning workers, such as retail, healthcare, transport and other customer-facing jobs, will be caught in a two-tiered economy. The latter will take a seat in the nosebleed section while our 2,755 billionaires dine in their sky boxes.
So what can we do about that?
Bryce Covert is an independent journalist focusing primarily on policies that affect workers and families. In his article for The New York Times on July 25th of this year he writes that:
Iceland just published results from an experiment with a four day work week in Reykjavik that ran from 2015 to 2019 and found that productivity did not decline and in some cases improved. That seems to be a good step forward.
We must recognize that working too long is bad for our health, associated with not just weight gain and more alcohol and tobacco use but also higher rates of injury, illness, and death.
Covert writes,”Long work hours are the largest of any occupational risk factor calculated to date.”
Long hours wreak havoc on families, especially those who have to make a living with unpredictable work hours. Susan Lambert, a professor of social work at the University of Chicago said that “They cannot fully engage in their personal or family life.”
Think about that.
And you can’t forget Henry Ford, who famously reduced shifts in his auto plants in 1914 to eight hours a day without cutting worker’s pay and was rewarded with a boom in output.
How hard would it be to move the mountain for all those people who struggle, working paycheck to paycheck, to keep house and home together?
I am readily happy to admit that it will be slow, invisible, and dormant much of the time, but I measure the quality of life by how many layers of glass we can avoid while we send our emails through the air, making deep and lasting changes to our nervous systems.
It reminds me of the prostitutes of Amsterdam who sit behind window glass, beckoning their prey and hawking their wares. They will not be making love, they will be making a sordid living.
Many of us have lost our livelihoods, one of them me. I look at these people on Twitter and Facebook and think, “Can’t we have a recess, a hiatus, a time out? I don’t want to keep on going, doing the same thing over and over.”
And yet I admire these guys on Twitter, dreaming big, these hucksters, these Johnnies on the spot, who pick up pennies in front of the steam roller that is rumbling this way, brandishing curses.