Thoughts & Observations

The New Disparity Between Work and Life

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There’s a new disparity between work and the rest of life.

In the past, the length of time that we expected to be in a job or a specific career was likely to match the timespan of the other commitments we wanted to make: we could plan to spend 30 years in a job, and also plan to spend 20 to 30 years paying for a house; 20 to 30 years raising kids; and 40 or more years in a marriage.

Planning in multi-decade increments felt comfortable because we could count on a job (and then some kind of retirement) to support us during that entire span of span of time.

Now, many of us still have those life goals (get married, own a home, have kids), but a lot fewer of us have a job or career that will be consistent over the same timespan. On average, people now stay in jobs for only 3 to 5 years, and that can be even shorter for Gen Y and for people involved in certain industries (like people in tech startups who seem to change jobs every six months to a year).

That leaves me with a question I haven’t quite found the answer to: how, exactly, are we supposed to go about making 20 to 30 year commitments to a house and raising kids when we can only see our future income six months, a year, or, at most, a couple years out?

 

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There’s Something Between All or Nothing

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We tend to get caught in extremes.

It’s easier to categorize things that way. It’s easier to say that something is either simply good or bad then to come up with a complicated descriptive term that allows for it to be a little bit of both.

Our natural reaction when something doesn’t work also has a tendency towards extremes. We react to failure by swinging the pendulum in the complete opposite direction.

There are a lot of people (including me) who find themselves in this trap when it comes to how much impact they can have on the world. I find myself swinging back and forth at times between feeling like I can change the world and feeling like I can’t change anything.

But as a wise friend pointed out to me this morning, there is something in the middle.

In between doing nothing and changing the entire world, there is a lot that can be done.

Maybe I can’t change the entire world, but I can make one person’s life better.

It’s a simple thought and certainly not a new one, but it’s something that seems incredibly easy to forget as we all strive to add value to the world.