workaholism

I decided to take a peek at my google analytics the other day, and I discovered that by far and away the most popular post on my site over the year to date is one I’m actually rather proud of: Me And Maslow’s Pyramid of Human Needs Down By The Schoolyard. Almost 1000 people have seen that so far this year. Even assuming half of them were robots (and hey, robots need philosophy too), that’s still immensely gratifying.

Its no secret I’ve been burning the candle at both ends lately. When I come down to SF it tends to get worse, feeding my workaholism. Even though this is ostensibly a thriving cosmopolitan metro area, I really have no life here, and with an office it’s easy to stay at work to the point where coming home is just a trip you make to sleep before getting up to do it again. It reminds me of the MFA days in a way, or college. Any of those times when I was doing stuff for 16+ hours a day and having no sex.

Not that I’m complaining. Coming home late and hungry and unable to find a can-opener to make myself some tuna salad notwithstanding, I’m a ways away from the point where this pattern really generates any kind of meaningful irritation or negative response. Indeed, for as long as things can be kept in the power curve — never forever, but what is? — this isn’t a bad way to exist. It makes me productive and relatively happy w/feelings of accomplishment, etc, and possibly even provides good grist for later milling when time is less tight.

And still, I can’t help but feel like something is slipping past me here. I mean, the impending birthday is probably driving these feelings, sure, but I can’t shake the sensation that I’m whistling into oblivion. I can’t help but note the toll my current pace of activity (and past times of uber-business) put on my existing relationships, the massive impediment it poses to forming new connections.

To put it another way, I’ve never fallen in love in the midst of a workaholic bender. I’ve never even come close, to the best of my recollection. I’ve generally been frustrated and lonesome. It’s a startling and embarrassing admission of mortality, but apparently my own tender human flower needs time and space to unfold. Who would have thunk it.

Back in March in Boston, I shared a meal with my friend Kate, and she told me about a dinner party at which the initially-suspect hostess (a psychiatrist or psychologist or some other consciousness manipulator) orchestrated the initial chit-chat around a series of questions designed to lead to meaningful table conversation. It turned out to be quite a winning program. One of the questions asked — and one we discussed as quite an illuminating query if one takes it seriously — is that of “what is it really that gets you out of bed in the morning?”

Whether you’re one who’d rather stay in bed, but you’re coaxed/driven out by some feeling, or the type who just can’t stay put, or even someone who’s depressed and feels like they’d just rather call it off for a day, we all rise and meet the world at some point. Why? What is it that prompts or provokes us to expend that human effort? What is it that fuels our first conscious acts? It’s a fascinating question to ponder, and a revealing one to share.

For me the gut reaction, and one I don’t love to be honest, is that there are things and people that count on me. Shit will get fucked up if I don’t get out of bed. There are many other amazing reasons to love being alive, some of which I feel from time to time, but that’s what that causes me to rise and meet the day: responsibility and obligation.

Now, I can spin this as a positive thing, and it’s arguably not a bad character trait to be responsible, to feel a sense obligation, noblesse oblige even. Still, in my heart of hearts I feel this is evidence of a huge problem for me. While I clearly do have a sense of obligation, and it works, and I can appreciate how responsibility figures large into the larger arcs of life, I don’t really believe that this is a sustainable state of things for me personally.

For as long as I’ve known myself, I’ve been motivated by my passions and ambitions. While those are clearly still in play, I feel they’re increasingly dulled, sublimated, subsumed under various auspices. My starry eyes are all but extinguished, my grand sense of ambition whittled down to positive fiscal growth. That’s no way to be. It’s rather sad, actually.

In any event, the conclusion I came to whilst pondering this on the BART is that I should probably do some things for myself. I have no idea what those things might be, but it seems necessary (if not necessarily right) to root around inside for some purely selfish motivations, and see if they can’t be satisfied.

So, it’s this kind of head-space that I take with me to the deserts of SoCal, for a bonafide vacation weekend. It’s good timing, really. I’m hoping that a change of scenery and company will help jog my thinking further.

This is my new hat, courtesy Molly Dove, which I debuted at the Cornell Club housewarming a few weeks ago. I’ve come to really like it. It’s hip but not too hip. Nerdy but not too nerdy. It keeps my head surprisingly warm, the sun off my face, and I can choose whether to sport it at a jaunty rakish angle or straight-ahead squaresville. I think it’s quite fetching.

It’s also a good one for the figurative “hat” I wear at my job. For the first year and a half of our bootstrappy startup we operated under an implied “everyone does everything” organizational strategy. This works when it’s just the three of you, and it’s good for keeping managerial overhead down and equality high, but ultimately people have talents, and these are distributed unequally. Specialization is necessary at some point if we’re to grow.

For the first year of our work I had an informal (and largely unwanted) authority position as the oldest and most business-experienced member of the team. It was not the greatest fit as I have no particular desire to be the boss, and I haven’t been living in the same town as my partners. It was what it was and I’m glad things worked out as well as they did, but nevertheless I’m happy that things are changing.

To wit, the defined roles are going to emerge. I’ll be working more and more on the technical side of things; not necessarily writing more code directly, but taking designated responsibility for the code that our (eep!) employees will be crafting. Matt has already taken over the general operational management of the business, as his personal drive and passion for todo lists makes him a natural fit there. Zack is returning to his strong suit of evangelism and high-level Drupal architecture; he’ll be out in front of our clients and working in pair with more (eep!) employees in the office to guide them through implementations and up the learning curve.

I think it’s a good way to break things down. We all have our own power positions. Matt keeps everyone on-task, Zack controls the relationships that drive our bottom line, and I get to draft the code that’s ultimately what we’re selling. It’s also going to make it possible for us to grow up in a meaningful way. As I mentioned, more employees are on their way, and a Humboldt County office could well materialize over the summer. In spite of all the economic doom and gloom, we’re expanding!

All of which is making the job more exciting again, which is nice. I still need a vacation, but feeling excited about the future prospects — rather than being in the “grind it out” mode — is a much needed and welcome change.

It’s been a good weekend, with lots of sleeping in and no drudgework at all. Absent the pressure-cooker mentality I tend to find myself a little listless and bored, especially in the recent aftermath.

When you’re a small child, the most boring day in your life is the day after you go to Disneyland. It’s a very high high, tons of stimulation, really kind of incredible if you think about all the psychic energy that gets built up by the whole Disney cultural complex. Anyway, the next day you’re one strung-out six year old, and you don’t even really understand what’s happening.

The trajectory of my adult life has grown up around projects. Productions, plays, parties, road trips, websites, campaigns… all variations on the general theme of engaging in an ostensibly focused effort to Get Something Done. At their best, they’re like little births; creative miracles born in the spastic passion of inspiration and carried to term with love, craft and care.

At their best or worst though, projects tend to leave me with that same Disneyland hangover. The stress and attention called for to see things through the last mile are (ideally) some of the highest functioning times we experience as human beings. Afterwards, our metaphysitcal children born, grown, gone, and possibly even dead, we wonder what to do with our lives.

War Crisis Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning
The boom-bust psychology of project-based living presents a very real series of pitfalls. The post-peak decompression is very often an unpleasant and inarticulate state of consciousness. Unlike intentional rituals of spiritual purification — which also tend to revolve around some peak experience, but have well-tested frameworks for what comes before and after — finishing a project (again, like going to Disneyland) is more often than not mentally framed as nothing more than a normatively good achievement. A notch in the belt, a feather in the cap, a ladder-rung clumb, at minimum some business out the door, something your parents would smile upon you for having achieved.

This narrative is deceptive. Nothing in it hints at the un-reality of “being done” or at the thousand challenges embedded in completion. It leaves us woefully unprepared for the sudden void that follows. At a time when we’re supposed to be Better Than Ever, we find ourselves empty, confused. We want to get back the good feeling, or at the very least we want to get away from this bad one. It’s a hangover, and like weekenders going for a bloody mary with brunch, the usual answer for us binge-oriented workaholics is to light into another project.

For many high-functioning people who live at the top end of statistical measures of human capacity, especially those who find themselves embedded in organizations or ongoing efforts of some real or imagined importance, this gradually evolves into a semi-permanent state of crisis. You start by working through your weekends to meet some critical deadline, and the next thing you know you’re (possibly subconsciously) planning on it all the time. You go from “performing well under pressure” to someone who requires and expects pressure to perform at all.

As someone who falls into this pattern via the putative pursuit of effectiveness — the first several steps at least are all about being proactive and getting things done — I’m forced to recognize the utter inefficiency of where this mentality leads. I’ve slept under my desk before, and in the big picture it’s never really been any more productive than disciplined and focused effort would have been. More damningly, at least to the supposed pragmatic goal, it has limited my ability to cooperate effectively with others.

Indeed, total devotion to a project is quite often a cover for sloppy planning, procrastination, distraction, a lack of focus and coordination. You may work 100-hour superman weeks, but what are each of those hours really worth, and how long can you keep this up, and can you really do it all on your own? If you’re truly concerned with effectiveness in life and grasp the span of time’s arc, you have to seriously consider these questions in light of the years. Without presuming to speak for all of humanity, for most people and pursuits I suspect the honest answers are “not a lot,” “no” and “no.”

No Control
This leads to a second great truth of Workaholism, which is that when you’re sleeping under your desk you’re not sleeping in your bed; when you’re working through your weekend you’re not being a social animal; when you stay late at the office or bring work home you’re not spending energy and attention on your personal life.

If you’re like me and you acknowledge that all of the above have happened, you must at least consider that there’s something more going on than a screwed up working process. Life may be out of balance.

When I was recently in Portland for a day of semi-forced vacation, coming in after spending the night at O’Hare airport thanks to the brilliant bureaucracy of United Airlines, I got a good chance to hang out with my friend Tommy. A few years ago he came into a little cash and quit his proto-bourgeoise office job — Quiznos for lunch whenever he wanted — spent some time unemployed, and is now pursuing a much more self-conscious path in life, and is vastly happier for it.

One of the realizations he related when we were talking on this subject was that part of what drove the workaholic cycle for him was the fact that his non-work life contained countless things that were both unpleasant and entirely out of his control. By contrast, his work was something he could excel at and complete and feel in charge of, that he could win.

I immediately understood this. Life’s events are a much more dicey and uncertain series of contests, often resisting any notion of resolution. For instance, in my own mind that monday: Will this girl call me back? No? Can I call her? Yes, but since she’s not calling you back it probably won’t help. You’re just going to have to feel this way and wonder. Welcome to no control, brohan.

This question of control jives very well with what I know from my research into addiction. One of the more powerful metaphors I came across was that of the doorway/shelter: in essence, addictive behavior functions as a portal into some alternative state of consciousness, and also an escape or respite from whatever is difficult about “normal” life. Or maybe the opposite order of events. In either case, it’s a cyclical interrelated thing, and one of the critical factors in what makes something addictive is that the results of the behavior become predictable.

In other words, although it seems counterintuitive — largely because of the warped way in which mainstream culture interprets drugs — addicts very often assert control over their life though their behavior of choice.

Regardless of whether one inhabits the speed-freak yo-yo pattern of a project-based life or the steady maintenance rhythm of a low-hassle cubicle job, it’s easy to let this creep in and take over more and more of your energy and attention, to become the primary feature of your existence. This usually happens because other things aren’t, or aren’t going well. That’s something to consider.

Bringing It All Back Home
For my own part, I know I’m quite lucky to have a job which rewards me quite handsomely for my exertions. Owning a business is like that. There’s a nice payoff in it for me, though perhaps this only enhances the seductive qualities of work. In any event, work-junk can deliver real benefits to my life, and if I manage my habit well it could really “work out,” as they say.

Yet that said, it’s a hard thing to wake up and realize the truth of an addiction. The first step is admitting you have a problem, etc. I often tell people that my one true vice is caffeine. In the realm of drugs I’m used to enjoying a couple beers or scotch in the evening, and when it’s readily at hand I will supplement that with bit of hashish, but these are things that come in and out of my life without creating any real disruption by their presence or absence. Kicking coffee puts me through real physical withdrawal, but more importantly I don’t feel like me without it.

I’ve never even tried to kick work. The closest I think I’ve come is Vagabender, but that was an enormous project in its own right. It was recreational, but it was also work in the sense that it required sustained and not entirely pleasant efforts to keep rolling. I have no idea the kind of withdrawal I’d go though, or what I’d feel like. It probably wouldn’t be pretty.

However, one of the other great takeaways from my addiction studies is that I don’t take part in the reflexive disdain that our culture promotes by default. Beliefs are habits of action, and so are addictions. That gets right to the crux. Some habits are better and some are worse, but very few can be judged one way or another without a real look at their context, the multiple overlapping factors that drive us.

So, I don’t necessarily even want to quit drinking coffee — though I would like whiter teeth — and I don’t think I’ll ever stop living my life around projects. I recognize the whithering of the rest of my life when work takes over, but the question is not how to “get clean.” Clean is an illusion. “Healthy,” however, is something to consider. Physically I don’t have too many worries there, but psycho-socially I have to admit real concerns for myself and my future.

There are simple common-sense things you can do to be healthier. You can go to the gym. You can eat better foods. You can floss. Socially you can spend time with your friends and family. You can tell other people truths about your life, share in the great fraternity of human experience. You can take in great and small works of culture. You can explore the natural world. You can have relationships.

For all those things, you must make space and time. You must set aside energy and the will to focus, at least enough to get you through the door, maybe more to keep you out there.

This is harder than it sounds. If you’re coming off some kind of junk you’re likely to find yourself at least a little numb. You may find yourself changed, marked, disinterested in the things from which other people derive meaning. It may be hard to relate, and the temptation to go back to what you know will be ever-present.

In time, with luck, the mind and heart will open and other habits of action will emerge. New and healthier beliefs will take root, the out-of-control nature of Life now an adventure rather than dark and stormy shitpile. In time, with luck, and hope.

On the topic of “the Good Old Days,” I have some semi-strong feelings. I’m as dubious of nostalgia as the next guy, and while I love the process of maturation, I fear and loathe the narrative of “getting old.” I have all sorts of fun memories of more free, innocent, wild and irresponsible times. Good times. Fun. Naturally given a more regularized, orderly, and subdued existence memories of pure fun are attractive, but those aren’t really what I’d call “the Good Old Days.”

What I look back on with envy are the times in my life when I really knew what I wanted, and felt like I was getting it, in both the big and little pictures — times when it could be reasonably argued that I was, indeed, “living the dream.” That’s what I’m talking about.

My early 21st-Century dreams may have been unrealistic, hazy, naive and fraught with delusions of grandeur, they were still pretty awesome, and to be perfectly honest I don’t feel like my dreams were wrong; I feel as though I failed in bringing them to reality. In spite of my (best?) efforts things didn’t work out, and in a series of dark skirmishes over 2003-04 the purest hopes I can go on record as ever possessing were all put to rest.

It can and has been said that I just need to get over it, and in some ways I have, but this is my history. It colors everything I do. It is why I am the man I am. I’m not trying to throw a pity party — objectively I know I’m lucky, and doing quite well — but I do wonder why, when talking with my two best friends and finally getting down to a level, I don’t have much positive to say for myself.

Previously I’ve lamented the creeping ennui that comes as a side effect of no longer living in a high-pressure environment, but really I see that as just a symptom of the larger cause. I felt mostly the same when I last lived in New York; it was just easier to ignore vis-a-vis distraction. That’s part of why I wanted to get out of there: to see what would bubble up if the artificial pressure were off.

Turns out what bubbles up is a tangle, a complex web of ideas and opportunities and people and places, desires and regrets. It’s life, and it’s neither fair nor easy.

In the face of this I’ve been somewhat indecisive. I have a hard time with compartmentalization. It’s both difficult and non-enjoyable for me to try and make strong decisions based on the single-track pursuit of work or relationships or anything abstracted from the holistic system that is my life. But the whole is inscrutable, almost unknowable, leading to some personal variation on the theme of analysis paralysis.

However, as Rush reminds us, if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

Returning to some of the deeper psychic wells I have to draw on — fantasy + reality = experience — I seem to be suffering from a shortage of fantasy. Reality abounds, and objectively the real circumstances of my life are easy and enviable, and yet my experience remains marked by shame and confusion.

What up with that? Well, my cheap bohemian math suggests that it’s a lack of ideas, of myth, beliefs. Raw reality is bewildering and confusing. Even if one has a keen analytical mind and can “make sense” of the world, without some concept of where things are headed and why (such concepts as can only be given true life outside the iron cage of rationality) the spirit suffers.

I feel scattered. Since I was a little kid going to spend weekends at my Dad’s, I’ve been nurturing the ability to maintain disparate relationships, and as my life has blossomed over the past 10 years I’ve collected more and more of these. I’ve done a weird variety of things, met a motley collection of comrades, and built what could pass for a career out of bridging gaps. In positive manifestation, I feel connected (if not always strongly) to an absolutely inspiring array of people, places, processes and scenes, loving nearly every aspect of humanity. On the downside, integrating this into that holistic picture of life, the kind that will really let me make choices, seems to border on impossible.

The worst of this is that the indecision seems to be choking out my passion and enthusiasm. Without some vision (fantasy) to integrate a critical mass off all my interests, I’m left floppin’ around, fumbling the flutter. I fear and loathe the narrative of “getting old,” and I don’t really feel that way. But I do feel like time’s a wastin’.

The law of diminishing returns is kicking in. This is the third straight weekend worked through, which is something I don’t really mind terribly — I’ve gone months and months like this before — but which I recognize as questionable in effectiveness over time. If all you do is work, it’s easy to slide into a mode of semi-constant semi-production: there’s nothing to look forward to at the end of a task but the next task, so you don’t really dig in and focus the way you might if, say, you had a big fun trip planned once work was done.

Yeah, 12 hour days at 66% productivity; belly up to the desk and stare into your pint of workahol, rummy. This is how so many “professional” people end up with broken relationships and no social life, I think, and it’s frightening to see it might be happening to me.

Life is contrasts, a holy waltz of experience. Change is the only thing we can perceive. I believe it’s true on a literal/micro level, and more importantly at a philosophical meta/macro level too. The feeling you get from moving fast isn’t the speed itself, it’s the delta, the change. It’s physics. Force equals mass times acceleration, the difference in the velocity-vector over time. That’s what we feel.

Which is a highfalutin way of saying I’ve been more than a little rut-stuck lately, and rolling with the dayjob 24/7 isn’t helping much. I feel numb and restless. It was a convenient distraction at first, a nice excuse to shut out petty personal problems, but now we’re down to the grind, and the pressure is throwing all my psychic flaws into sharper relief than ever. I’m struggling. The most important thing is to stop struggling.

Things I’m spinning my wheels over:

• Ambition, the hungry dynamo within, is starting to give me heartburn. How is all this leading to global salvation again?
• Having lived here for a year and a half, and still feeling like a social retard, not fully alive in my own skin.
• Faces from the past, squandered love, etc. Don’t ever let a girl tell you she’s yr only chance at happiness, even in jest. Those statements have a way of sticking.

I suppose I’m questioning my whole situation, struggling through a particularly un-fun couple of weeks and feeling especially confined by my environment. This temporal crunch will pass, and I accept the fact that existential crises are persistent, that we don’t ever really answer these questions. But still. The journey may be the purpose but I also want to feel some goddamn progress.

I want to feel. Change. Acceleration. Shifting vectors.

Progress. I want to believe in the divinity of my forward momentum. I want to make for that light at the end of the tunnel. I want something more than cliché catchphrases and bittersweet memories to cling to.

Fuck.

Oh well. Back to work. Next week I’ll get my ass up to Oregon, see my mom, see some good friends I haven’t seen in years. Perhaps swimming back upstream will help me renew myself.