Note from the editor: Contributors to this site usually send me their thoughts about work in essay form. After all, that’s what the FAQ requests. But Stephanie K. Turner of Cincinnati, Ohio sent me two poems, and I liked them very much. Here they are…

The Editor

She toned the hues of purple prose,
she patched together poems;
she bitched about the typos
found in published tomes;
she counted out the scansion
and tidied up the rhymes;
fixed spelling and punctuation
ten thousand million times;
but when asked, “Are you a writer?”
She said sadly, “Me? Oh no.
I do not soar in graceful vees;
I just keep the ducks in rows.”

The Workerwoman’s Prayer

Oh Father Time, be my good friend,
And make this week like water wend:
Make the days as short as grass,
Once the hungry sheep have passed;
Make the moon fly through the sky
As swallows swoop at even time.
Five days short and sweet for me,
‘Gainst two days long and slow with he
Who long of limb and lingering eye
Makes this working woman sigh.

By Kate Gace Walton

“I don’t attach to a cause easily.” This line from my recent interview with Slate editor David Plotz has been ringing in my head since we spoke. In the interview, Plotz explained why he chose journalism over law: he said he’s always liked to ask questions. He also said he’s a “skipper,” that he gets bored easily and prefers to jump around from thing to thing. But the third quality he cited—this bit about not attaching easily to a cause—is the one that made me think: Skeptic. Plotz is a classic Skeptic, eager to run alongside the bandwagon—the better to observe, analyze, and challenge it—but jumping aboard, even for a short time, would make for an uncomfortable ride.

By Kate Gace Walton

On that sunny Tuesday morning eleven years ago, I was sitting in a conference room high above Madison Avenue. The start-up I had co-founded had no business being housed at such a fancy address, but our investors had gotten us a great deal on the rent, and we were still feeling bullish: if the spreadsheets were right (they weren’t), the business would take off very soon. Affinity groups. Aggregate purchasing power. Network effects. These were the preoccupations that had consumed the previous two years; in fact, until that morning, I had thought about little else since mid-1999.

Time stopped after we got word that a plane, a big plane, had hit a building. Those things which had seemed so urgent just moments before were dropped, and when we heard about the second plane, we all dispersed, in search of information as much as anything. The news was too strange to believe, and our cell phones had become useless; going outside to look for ourselves seemed like the most logical thing to do.

The rest of the day was spent huddled around a television in a friend’s apartment on 57th Street. By then, we had breathed for blocks that acrid air, and we had seen for ourselves the impossible—that the towers were no longer in their place in the sky. But watching it all as TV news, it still felt unreal. In the late afternoon, my boyfriend and I walked home to Brooklyn. It took an hour or so to get downtown and even longer to make our way across the Brooklyn Bridge. Everyone moved slowly, and people were kind to one another, as if we were no longer strangers.

***

In the days and weeks that followed 9/11, one thing that struck me again and again was this: so many of the people who died in those attacks were at work. Flying to a meeting. Sitting at a desk. Waiting tables. Washing windows. Roko Camaj, an Albanian immigrant who was killed in the attacks, had worked as a window washer at the World Trade Center for 26 years.

On that Tuesday, the most ordinary routines were shattered in the most unthinkable way.

***

Two New Yorkers I’ve interviewed for Work Stew were also on the job that day: Jane Viau was a VP at Merrill Lynch, and Christine O’Connor was an administrative assistant for a contractor. Shortly after 9/11, both made radical life changes.

Viau decided to leave her 16-year finance career to become a high school math teacher; she has been teaching at the Frederick Douglass Academy, a public school in Harlem, for the past ten years. O’Connor applied to the New York City fire department and, after a long and arduous evaluation process, she was eventually accepted. Today, she is one of only 28 women among New York’s roughly 10,000 firefighters.

***

Why do I mention these people and their stories? Why am I sharing my own? Because to a large extent, the dazed confusion of that walk across the Brooklyn Bridge is still with me. Nothing made sense on 9/11, and the only way I can even begin to think about it is person by person, story by story. You?

***

By Alice Pekarkova

Housekeeping isn’t an easy job. It requires that you be in good physical condition. To run your own business, you also need strong communications skills, administrative skills, and a knack for time management. And to do a really good job, you need a sense of purpose. When I clean a house, I recognize that I am doing more than vacuuming, scrubbing, and dusting. I am creating a peaceful refuge for my clients. I am also giving them what they seem to treasure most of all: time.

By Gerald C. Kempthorne, M.D.

My medical career started out in a small town in Wisconsin after medical school at the University of Maryland and training at the Cook County Hospital in Chicago. I chose to be a “big fish” in a small pond. Spring Green had no physicians, hospital, or pharmacy at the time of my arrival in 1962—fifty years ago. I grew up in a small town and found the warmth and friendliness of it to be desirable. I knew I wanted to be a part of the community and its life. Spring Green was the home of Frank Lloyd Wright, and his name and fame attracted me.

My practice grew rapidly and eventually a pharmacy came to town. Many years later, other physicians came and established practices. In 1994, after thirty-two years of family practice, I moved on to a position as a medical director in a large health insurance company where I remained for the final four years before retirement in 1998. I married my Dutch wife in Holland in 1966, and we continued the active involvement in our community that we both cherished until she was killed in an automobile accident in 1993.

In the course of practicing medicine, I had the privilege of meeting many interesting people. One in particular stood out as extraordinary because of her international fame and recognition: Svetlana Alliluyeva Peters was the only daughter of Josef Stalin. She had defected to America in 1967 and was invited to Taliesin West (Frank Lloyd Wright’s home in Scottsdale, Arizona) by Mrs. Wright. She arrived there in 1970. I met her as a patient in 1971 and remained in contact with her until her death in 2011. Over the years, we became friends and had a lengthy correspondence. She had married Wright’s protégé William Wesley Peters, and they had a daughter, Olga. Our friendship grew out of the initial patient/doctor contact. She lived in Wisconsin for much of her life after her divorce from Mr. Peters, who incidentally designed my office in downtown Spring Green. She made one trip back to Russia and also lived in England for a while.

In my view, nurturing such friendships is an important part of a life’s work. Now, at the age of eighty-two, I can look back and realize the value of knowing so many people who enriched my life with their wisdom, knowledge, and experience; in retirement, I would be very unhappy to think that I did not make the effort to get to know the people I served. The life of a small town physician gave me the opportunity to meet people from all walks of life. Now, many of them are gone. Svetlana died in November of 2011, and we talked three times just before she died. I am so pleased we were friends for forty years—until the end.

Like practicing medicine, nurturing life-long friendships requires an ability to listen. In the very early days of medical school, I had the opportunity to learn the value of listening. Our Professor of Psychiatry brought a young black man into our amphitheater. Dr. Finesinger opened the conversation by asking the patient some brief questions about his health. The man was initially intimidated but with encouragement, he began to unload his problems. He was only twenty-eight years old, married with a family, and had malignant hypertension and a bleeding ulcer. He talked about his poverty and the hopelessness of his future. We were all captivated by his candor in telling us his story. Dr. Finesinger said very little but allowed the young man the comfort he needed to talk. That young man taught us more than any book could ever do.

I live by a credo that I created for myself. Simply stated: “A life lived without a worthy purpose is but an existence.” The sage old Spring Green banker who leant me the money I needed to start my practice also said something I have always treasured: “Remember, Dr. Kempthorne, you will never get rich by gouging people.” I never forgot that admonition, and I’ve found a great sense of purpose, both in practicing medicine and in meeting interesting people.

By David Matthews

I am employed again at the same company that laid me off. If I think about this paradox for too long, it makes me cringe.

I try to feel grateful, I really do. I try to find that place where there’s no bitterness or resentment. I try to feel like there was no lost opportunity, no stagnated career. But to do so requires that I hold opposing thoughts in my brain simultaneously. The effect is numbing, much like the feeling you get after a deafening noise. My head swims and my ears ring. I want to sit down as my knees weaken and the blood drains from my face. I shake my head, rotate my jaw, rub my eyes.

How do I get through this?

I’m pretty sure I don’t act “normal” in the office. I avoid eye contact with previous colleagues, not speaking unless spoken to. I avoid socializing with most employees; instead, I hide in my corner of the floor, sneaking in and out of the building. If I do find myself in conversation about my return, I make light of it and change the subject.

Do I have a haunted look about me? Do I exude despair? Probably. I am a current/former employee, a weak position from which to navigate a career.

In college, I had dreams of my work amounting to more than just a paycheck. I thought I would do something truly useful to others, that I would see an unmet need and fill it to the best of my ability. In my view, having a career, a life’s work, is a critical component of the male identity. Author Michael Gurian, in his book The Purpose of Boys, says that males are predisposed to finding purpose in feeling needed. Busywork doesn’t cut it, and hollow statements of praise or gratitude are even worse. The feeling of doing something worthwhile must be genuine.

I also thought that talent would be recognized, credit would be given where credit was due, and I would move ahead. Years passed, however, and my career went nowhere. I had little opportunity to create quality professional relationships, either within or outside the company. I tried going to conferences and volunteering for special projects, but other than a modest ‘thank you,’ nothing came of it.

At some point it dawned on me that, if I did nothing, my chances for advancement were zero, or worse, I could lose my job. I applied for open positions within the company, but in doing so I learned that my skills did not transfer. I was quite literally unqualified to work any other job in the corporation. And then the day came when my fears were confirmed, and the corporation no longer needed my skills. In 2009, as the shockwave from the sub-prime mortgage crisis was still reverberating through the economy, my position was eliminated.

After my layoff, when I stopped licking my wounds and began to look for work, I found that my experience carried no weight in the outside world either. It opened no doors. Not one. I’m not quite sure how it happened, but apparently I have a skill set that is of no value to anyone. I came to regret my 15 years spent under the corporate umbrella, with nothing to show for it.

When I was asked to return to my former employer, I truly wish I’d been in a position to refuse, to say that I was actively being recruited, that any day I expected an offer. “Thanks, but I’ve found work elsewhere,” I wanted to say. “Good luck, and keep in touch.”

But I couldn’t say that. I was on the verge of running out of unemployment benefits, and my COBRA continuation of healthcare coverage was about to expire. I have a wife with health issues, two young kids, and a mortgage. I had no choice.

So I came back. Humiliating may sound too strong of a word, but that’s what springs to mind, in the sense that I was humbled. My grand plans of striking off to a successful new venture were fantasy. My idea that I was in control of my own future was a myth. My perception that what I did mattered to the company was proven false, as former colleagues carry on without me, even winning awards for a project that I most assuredly would have participated in had I stayed. How can I feel genuinely happy for their success when my own contributions were not recognized?

Writer Amy Gutman points out that contempt and shame are now an integral part of unemployment, and I would add that the same is true for underemployment. Careers that derail run counter to the American ethic that you can make it if you try. Opportunity awaits, people seem to say, so there must be something wrong with you!

But let’s be frank. There is no future except that which is handed to you by circumstances. In the musical chairs game called employment, I was one who got stuck with no chair when the music stopped. And then, just as suddenly, I had the chair offered again with a hearty “No hard feelings!” I feel I’m the kid whose pants have been pulled down in public and then asked why I can’t take a joke. Some jokes are not funny. Like my career—one big, unfunny joke.

And this is key. For there to be a career, a two-way commitment is needed. An employee must have a commitment to the goals and principles of the employer, and in return, the employer must be committed to the continued well-being of the workforce. Anything less is just a paycheck. I’ve come to believe, in this post-recession economy, that the idea of a career is becoming obsolete. The best we can look forward to is a series of somewhat related jobs.

The hardest thing for me is the question, “What do you do?” What I want to say is, “Nothing of consequence.” I am employed and not employed. I am here and not here. I am useful and not useful. I am a paradox.

Note: David Matthews is a pen name.

By Jane Doh

Describing what I do for a living has never been easy. For many years, I worked for an NGO in the field of democracy development. When people asked my parents about my job, it was practically impossible for them to explain it—and even I struggled to present it succinctly. Happily, with the end of the Clinton administration, the former Secretary of State became my NGO’s Chairperson. This meant that my parents could field any questions about my job simply by saying that I worked for Madeleine Albright. This made them happy. And until very recently they could also describe my next job pretty easily: they could just say that I worked for the United Nations.

In reality though, there is nothing simple about working for the UN. Acronyms abound. Change comes very slowly. I sometimes wonder if any other organization on earth still uses triplicate carbon paper and American Express traveller’s checks. Staffing decisions at the UN appear to be particularly complicated exercises. For starters, there are various categories of individuals employed at the UN: international hires and national hires, professional staff and administrative staff, regular staff and temporary staff.

Between “regular” staff and “temporary” staff, conditions and benefits differ considerably. The main difference is that regular staff have job security, and after 20 years a pension, although recent rule changes mean that temporary staff also get inferior health benefits, fewer vacation and sick days, and are not permitted to work for more than 364 days before taking a mandatory break. Ostensibly, these differences were instituted to encourage the organization not to hire people on a temporary basis but to try and fill openings through the more laborious recruitment system for regular personnel.

However, the recruitment for regular staff can take upwards of one year, so the elimination of temporary staff does not look to be near at hand. Moreover, the system allows regular staff to temporarily take other jobs while “holding” their original posts—which are then filled by other temporary staff. On the off chance you’re still with me, get this: it is even possible for a temporary staff member to be temporarily filling a temporary post. In fact, that is what I am doing right now.

I am currently serving as a Human Rights Officer for five weeks covering for a colleague who is on maternity leave for 16 weeks. The person who was competitively recruited for this temporary post could not arrive until next month, so I am filling in on a temporary basis for the temporary replacement.

Why am I in this particular role? Because I wanted to find a way to stay in Switzerland with my family. And while that sounds like a reasonable goal to me, achieving it has been about as complicated as, oh, democracy development.

Here’s the deal: I was “separated” from the UN at the end of last year after the expiration of my contract. Once dismissed from the UN, my ‘carte de legitimacion,’ a residency permit of sorts linked to my employment with an official international organization, essentially expired.

I understood that I was entitled to a two-month extension, a courtesy period extended by the Swiss Government to either find a new legitimizing arrangement, or to wrap up one’s affairs and leave Switzerland. I also understood that as an American, I was entitled without a visa to be a tourist within the Schengen Area, of which Switzerland is a member, for up to 90 days. So at first I didn’t panic—I felt I had a good five months of running room to be re-hired and continue on my merry, albeit bureaucratic way. Another source of confidence that I would not be unceremoniously deported was the fact that my German partner and our two young children live legally in Switzerland. Since international human rights law recognizes the rights of the child to be united with his/her caregiver, I initially felt fairly secure that I would not be summarily booted.

Such a sense of security, it turns out, was entirely unfounded.

After 5.5 years of working for the UN with good performance reviews, I had assumed that my “separation” would not last long and that I would be re-recruited to my old “temporary” post after serving out my mandatory 31-day “contract break” (another way in the UN of saying involuntary unemployment, not to put too fine a point on it). It was only in mid-February that I realized something had gone terribly wrong, and I was not going to be hired back to my old job and was in imminent danger of violating Swiss immigration law.

I started by calling the Federal Office for Migration in Berne to get some information about what I could do as the American mother of two very young (both still in diapers) dual German-American citizens who have the right to reside in Switzerland. My partner and I are not married though most of the time we are a relatively happy family unit. As it happens, however, Swiss law is quite conservative on social issues, and I discovered that I didn’t fall into the category of people who are allowed to apply for family reunification visas (never mind that I was trying to prevent the need to be re-unified and merely wanted to find a way to stay unified). The official I reached by phone responded that since we were not married, I was considered a third country national and needed a new work permit. I told her that I didn’t have a job, so I didn’t need a work permit. She referred me to the Cantonal (equivalent of a state) migration office, which is called the Geneva Population Office.

For several weeks, I fought the good fight—placing call after call and seeking out official after official. It just seemed crazy to me that I could be separated from my family –my babies!—simply because the UN’s byzantine hiring system meant I had a break in my employment. But that was the upshot. And I learned that I didn’t have five months of running room at all: because my office hadn’t applied for the two-month courtesy extension in time, I had only the 90-day tourist visa to rely on, and to get that visa I was required to leave Switzerland for a period of time.

Exhausted, I gave up the fight and booked a flight back to the States for the following week. It was not an ideal situation, as I could only take one of my two children back with me—to those who have tried to do a long-haul flight alone with two children under the age of 3, I do not have to explain this. We had to pretend to my son that his birthday was actually a few days earlier than his actual birthday, so that I could bake him cupcakes and watch him blow out his candles (repeatedly…he really, really likes to blow out candles).

When I came back a couple weeks later after visiting family, the immigration officer in the Zurich airport stamped my passport and confirmed I have 90 days to be in Switzerland. My office in the meantime found a solution for my residency problem, at least a short-term one. That would be this five-week contract with a demotion. At least the clock is reset and this time I know to insist that the UN apply for my 2-month courtesy extension before I give up my carte de legitimacion.

Although, this being the UN, I have not yet—two weeks into this contract—received my “letter of appointment” which I need in order to apply for the carte de legitimacion which anyway takes at least three weeks to process. Which means it might not arrive before the end of my contract anyway. If you think all of this distracts from the task at hand, which is monitoring human rights abuses around the world (did I mention that?)—yes, you’d be right. Just a bit.

By Ronald J. Granieri

“It must be great being a college professor. You get summers off!”

All professors have probably heard this sentiment, in one form or another. It is usually accompanied by a sigh, the commenter wishing that she had such a cushy life. Though as many times as I have heard it, I know that it is not necessarily intended as a slight or a criticism. Most often, it is expressed as a good-natured if ignorant observation about the unusual perks of a somewhat exotic job, rather like when people tell flight attendants, “Wow, you get to fly all over the place for free!”

What makes academic life seem so exotic is that being a professor is more like practicing a medieval craft than pursuing a modern profession. As befits a world of robes, elaborate ceremonies, and gothic quadrangles, universities maintain a system of unique rewards and demands that harkens back to pre-modern times.

Practically, this means that the work habits of academics are hard to reconcile with the patterns of most normal professions. Academics are supposed to do two things—produce knowledge and share that knowledge with the larger community. They are also, according to tradition, supposed to govern and police themselves. Although that does not mean what it used to, when universities had special laws and even their own jails (some of which are preserved as tourist sites in European university towns such as Heidelberg in Germany) it still means that universities pride themselves on being governed by their own—deans, directors, chairs, and presidents drawn from the faculty.[1]

In present parlance, that means university faculty members are evaluated according to the classic trilogy of research, teaching, and service to the academic community.[2]

Here we get at the root of the contrast between what people think professors do and what they actually do. For the things that are most visible to the outside world—teaching in the classroom, meeting with students in office hours, grading assignments—is also only a part of what academics are expected to do. When junior faculty sigh and say they “really need to find time to do my own work,” they are rarely referring to teaching. Indeed, even the most dedicated teacher who devotes time to developing and preparing new courses is going to need a lot of time alone to gather and develop new knowledge. That means everything from reading and reviewing the newest literature in their field to working on their own projects. None of these tasks lend themselves to punching a clock. Academics are paid to think and read and write, which means a lot of their time is unstructured, and they have freedom to organize it according to their own priorities. That is the positive view. The less positive view is to note that unstructured work means that it is never really over. There is always more to read, and those books and articles don’t write themselves.

So academics have to deal with less immediate but more constant pressures than people in other professions, all the year round. That is not a complaint, since I am sure that a lot of people in other types of jobs wish the pressures they felt were less tangible, but it is something to think about before claiming that because professors only teach a few classes a semester, or do not teach in the summer, they have a lot of “free time.”

If those outside academe have a hard time understanding what goes on there, that is also because the practical details of academic life can vary greatly depending on both the type of university or college and the field in which an academic operates (and of course upon whether one is on the tenure track). Schools can range from teaching-heavy colleges (which would include both small private institutions and satellite campuses of state universities, as well as community colleges) where the average professor is expected to offer four or five courses a semester (and do all of her own grading) to the elite research universities where the load is usually two courses a semester—perhaps less, if the faculty member has special administrative responsibilities such as chairing a department or directing an institute—and where most of the grading is done by graduate students, as part of their apprenticeship before beginning their own academic careers.[3]

Teaching and research exist in tight, inverse proportions: the lower the teaching load, the higher the research expectations.[4] What those research expectations may be depends on the field. In the natural sciences, successful academics are expected to manage a laboratory and conduct a range of experiments. That means hiring and supervising a small army of student assistants, and applying for and managing the large outside grants necessary to fund the operations. Natural scientists also publish several research reports and articles a year. Most of those publications will be multi-authored, which (to put it most charitably) allows scientists to leverage their work into more publications than they could have produced on their own. Humanities and social science professors publish fewer and longer pieces—journal articles and books, usually single-authored—and are less dependent on labs and grants, except when they need to travel to archives.

Critics ranging from undergraduates unable to get an appointment to complain about midterm grades to Wall Street Journal op-ed writers have attacked the attention faculty pay to what can appear to be unnecessarily esoteric research.[5] Imust admit to having mixed emotions about these criticisms. There is nothing wrong with demanding that faculty remember their responsibility to share their knowledge with non-specialists, and I am a firm believer in the importance of teaching. What such critics tend to miss, however, is the responsibility of professors not only to repeat old knowledge but to create new knowledge as well. At their best, such criticisms can serve to puncture the pomposity of over-specialized academics. At their worst, they sink to the level of the know-nothings who want to eliminate the library budget because no one has read all the books that are already in it.

Another peculiarity of the academic world is that the vast majority of these publications are essentially unpaid volunteer work. Academic journals do not pay their authors, nor do they usually pay their editors, who receive small stipends or teaching releases in return for their service to the profession. Typically, the reviewers who provide the double-blind evaluations necessary for peer review are also volunteers.[6] Compensation comes indirectly, in the form of tenure, promotion, or merit bonuses from one’s own university (as long as one is on the tenure track…but you guessed that already). Rare is the professor who makes real money from books. Most are happy to sell a few hundred copies in hardback to research libraries.[7] A fortunate minority makes it to paperback. Those books are adopted for course use, and can enjoy lifetime royalties that may even extend into four figures. An even smaller, most fortunate few may actually reach the broader general audience that is referenced in every book proposal ever written.

In the end, however, publication is valuable for how it serves the career interests of the professors—allowing them to develop a reputation in their fields, gain and hold plum positions, and especially to achieve the security of tenure. Critics might say this reveals a tension between the pursuit of knowledge and the demands of careerism, but no one has been able to come up with a better system.

At the same time, the relative weight given to teaching, research, and service in an overall tenure evaluation, and even the definition of success in each area, is a private matter to be determined by individual universities and their faculty. In vain do people search for some kind of precise measurement—the kind of thing the modern world craves.[8] Anyone who has gone through the tenure process (as your author has, multiple times) knows that Franz Kafka was an optimist. Schools are reluctant to be too specific in advance, lest they rob themselves of the freedom to decide individual cases without fear of litigation. Even when individual departments try to give specific advice, that advice comes with the large asterisk that no one can predict how the upper levels of administration, where the final decision rests, will ultimately decide a case. In the end, the only thing to be sure of is that you should probably be doing more than you are.[9]

That is one of the major reasons why so many professors become less productive once they cross the tenure finish line. That sense of crossing over, and being expected to take on greater responsibility for the community, yet somehow having to create meaning and purpose on their own, without that big brass ring as a motivator, can be an incredible burden. The phenomenon is so widespread that a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education explores the question of why Associate Professors have become some of the unhappiest people on campus.

Maybe they could all use some time off after all.

Ronald J. Granieri is currently a Contract Historian with the U.S. Department of Defense. For the past sixteen years he has also been an award-winning professor at a variety of institutions on and off the tenure-track, including The University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, Syracuse University, Furman University, and Susquehanna University.

By Peter Elliott

Last week’s New York Times opinion piece by Tim Kreider, “The Busy Trap,” threw out this challenge:

“More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.”

Now I happen to have the complete works of Richard Scarry (courtesy of my son’s passion for these books some 25 years ago). So I checked out the sorts of jobs performed by the likes of Noah, the boa constrictor, and Ukulele Louie (one of many cats). For completeness, I also took in the job interest of Lowly, the worm. And it turns out the only activities these characters performed were fishing, singing, playing music, and eating. But you get Tim Kreider’s drift:

• Focus on the important things in life, and don’t let busyness get in the way of this;
• Try, at the first opportunity, to choose “time over money”;
• Do not self-impose busyness (the “hedge against emptiness”) on your schedule;
• Some idleness is necessary to stimulate the creativity within you.

Slate Magazine’s Bryan Lowder has written a brief response to Kreider’s article. Lowder points out that very few can join Tim Kreider in his “charmed indolence,” suggesting that to have his “pleasantly open schedule” you would need “a healthy stack of family money or a generous institutional grant.“ Economics is indeed a constraint on choice, and for a time most of us have to adopt a life balance which is far from perfect. The key in my opinion is not to lose sight of the value of idleness and to strive for at least some modicum of it—not only in retirement, but also along the way.

In my case, I consistently tried to do high-end corporate law in locations remote from the City (the “City” in this case being the UK’s equivalent of Wall Street). My aim was to retain the excitement and interest of complex commercial transactions, but at the same time to enjoy my family and rural pleasures. On each occasion the “City” eventually won, and I ended up drawn inextricably back into the maelstrom of the “frenetic hustle,” until I performed the next correction (or until it was forced on me by one of life’s beautiful about-turns).

Looking back on my legal career, I have to be quite frank. I did law at university because I needed a career that paid. The law I had truly enjoyed, Constitutional and International Law, was the bit that related most closely to my real interest—History. I loathed Company Law and found it very dry. But when it came to the end of my Degree course, I was faced both with the need to secure a work permit to remain in the UK (I was South African) and the task of generating a reasonable income. So I headed into one of London’s largest law firms (then called Linklaters & Paines). The long corridors of endless grey lawyers, housed in a high-rise building at the heart of the City, seemed remarkably unattractive. But it was the route to entrenching myself in my new home. My base motives worked, as the UK Home Office extended my stay to allow me to train, and life continued. I got married, and had a family, and so kept on working as a commercial lawyer.

After a couple of years, I managed to escape the large London office by transferring to work in Linklaters’ small and friendly office in Brussels, Belgium (where I learned my French, which I now regard as my most valuable accomplishment). The workload was intense but the office was extremely sociable, and we also spent lots of “idle” time together outside work. This experience wedded me to the benefits of small offices. Thus, at the end of my time in Brussels, I made the clear choice in favour of “time over money.” I moved back to the UK to join a much smaller City firm, with a tiny commercial office in Gloucestershire, England (which for the benefit of our American readers is the equivalent of Vermont, to a New Yorker). This was a radical move, to work at a much lower salary, but it coincided with the years our three children arrived, and suited us very well.

Both these moves, in hindsight, were ways of ensuring that I still had enough “idleness” to indulge all the other pleasures that make life worthwhile (for me, mainly time with my family and friends). But, in the second case, my ambition to become a partner in the overall firm (which was still headquartered in London) drove me again towards “busyness.” I found that I liked learning about my clients’ small business activities. I enjoyed the “cut and thrust” of commercial negotiation. I was a reasonable commercial draftsman, and liked writing the contracts (although the reader will be aware that it has hammered my prose). Over time, my own ambitions—in concert with clients who called on weekends and public holidays—eroded our rural bliss and intruded on family life.

So my next “escape” was to move away from private legal practice and into Industry. For over 12 years I was the general counsel of a company then called English China Clays, the largest kaolin producer in the world (mainly producing coating material for glossy paper). The move reflected the fact that my real interest lay in the detail of the businesses, and how they could be grown, by acquisition or otherwise. I was a lot less interested in the technical legal aspects! Again I was pursuing the idyll of moving in the opposite direction to that of most corporate lawyers: I was based in Cornwall (even more remote than Gloucestershire!), where the company was the largest single employer. So although I was involved in City-type work, we were again living in a beautiful, and rural, part of the country.

In-house work had promised a better work-life balance. However, far from getting away from “busyness,” I found myself performing an international transactions job, at times spending up to ten weeks a year travelling in the United States, where most of our deals took place. Eventually within this global group I moved into more of a business role, and had management responsibility for all non-financial aspects of the corporate headquarters office. The Cornish idyll ended, and the work-life balance was disturbed, quite abruptly when a new Chief Executive moved our headquarters, and me (and the family), back to central England in the early 1990s. Large swathes of time were spent on deals and strategies, intended to change the trajectory of a company that was faced with falling prices, and lower demand, in its principal markets. We little realised that investors in the City of London, focusing only on short term profitability, would never allow us the time to complete these long term plans.

What was the upshot? Investors did not reward the company with the improved share price for which we had hoped. We became vulnerable to take-over, and were indeed taken over by a French company at the end of the 1990s. I realised the ultimate futility of my 12 years of work when I cleared out my corporate cupboard before leaving. Most of the documentation within the corporate secretariat I had run was irrelevant to their future, and was discarded. The new owners were simply not interested in any of the former management’s strategy thinking. The whole of the corporate services team I had built up was laid off. By some measures, my work there does not “matter”: today, there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that anything I did was of any enduring value. However, for me, personally, it was far from a wasted experience. For most of my time there, I was “engaged” by both my work and my colleagues. I still retain a few fast friends from that business. I also earned my living, which was what I needed to do. I look back on it as the high point of my career.

I then performed a similar role at another old Industrial giant, Burmah Castrol. Already in late 1999 this public company was looking for an exit, as management did not believe an independent lubricants business could continue to survive as such: it needed to be part of an oil major. The Management particularly liked my “victim of takeover” experience, as it was directly relevant to what they had in mind. So I worked for another two years in industry, mostly focusing on a hidden agenda of selling the company to one of the oil majors, but also performing the day job of running the corporate services activity at its headquarters. A couple of years later we were duly taken over by BP, and once again I was “on the street.” Again nothing remains of what I worked on at Burmah Castrol. The whole corporate services activity was eliminated, myself included. So again I emerged retaining a few friends, but leaving no footprint in the sand.

At the age of 50, I again had the opportunity to choose “time over money.” I wanted to be able to take my youngest two kids to school and to have dinner with the family each evening (a bit late you may say, as the two “kids” in question were now 13 and 17). So I looked only for a job that I could do within five miles of home. This was severely career-limiting (but home-life enhancing). I opted to return to private practice as a corporate lawyer in my home town of Oxford. The firm I went to initially proved a mistake for me personally, and it always takes time to work your way out of a wrong choice. But eventually I moved on to the task of opening an Oxford office for the large London firm I had worked for earlier in my career. We made good progress until the crash of 2008 when demand for our services simply fell away. The office was closed and our small team of lawyers scattered. But again: I do not regret this time at all. The main satisfaction for me lay in the relationships I developed with the younger lawyers I had recruited for this office, and whom I had mentored in the course of building the business. Perhaps this is a form of legacy.

Last year we made the switch to living in France—probably the most dramatic re-balancing towards “idleness” that we have managed so far. The only way to achieve this was to make a clean break with corporate law, to throw away the Blackberry, and to rid myself of pesky clients once and for all. As a result, I have been able to enjoy almost 12 months of this bliss, simply choosing to do what I want, always “busy,” but not in a way which would be acknowledged objectively as productive (and certainly not “economically” so).  We are now focused on the “necessary” jobs of the boa constrictor and the cat—but with much less ukulele and considerably more gardening.

Already, though, “busyness” is encroaching; perhaps it’s the influence of my Scots grandmother who believed so strongly in the overriding value of work (she pronounced it “wurkk”). I am drawn opportunistically to new projects: I am now contemplating a vine planting joint venture and the possibility of helping a local vigneron with the export marketing of his wines. I don’t know if I’ll take the plunge into busyness again, but as I consider this opportunity I am struck by the fact that, even in so-called “retirement,” my precious, hard-won idleness is always at risk—and mostly by own hand.

Peter Elliott grew up in South Africa, and went to Cambridge University in the early 1970s where he did a law degree. He then became a corporate lawyer in the City of London. He worked for half his career in legal private practice; the other half of his career was spent in industry, working for two English industrial behemoths both of whom have now disappeared from the corporate map. He is now retired, and living with his wife in the Languedoc, in South West France. They have a smallholding on which there are sunflower and cereal crops surrounded by vineyards.

By Kate Gace Walton

As the editor of a fledgling website focused on the subject of work, I should love the so-called Mommy Wars. In fact, every so often, Hunger Games-style, I should round up a few women to write dueling essays denigrating each other’s parenting styles and claiming superiority. This would, as they say, “drive traffic.” Unfortunately, it would also drive me bonkers.

I can’t stand the Mommy Wars, and here’s why:

1. They don’t really exist. A few limelight-seekers aside, stay-at-home moms and moms who work outside the home are not in fact at war with one another. For one thing, war is exhausting, and moms are tired. Tired and busy. Whether it’s wrangling the kids or seeking the Higgs boson, moms have lots to do. Sure, we all say snippy things from time to time (we’re TIRED, remember?), but there is no war. Given a free half hour, very few moms would choose to engage in a coordinated attack on an imaginary enemy. No, most of us would probably go on Facebook, like a few photos, and comment on a couple of posts (“You look great!…She’s so big!…Congrats!”) Inane, maybe—but a far cry from warmongering.

2. Even the teams are ‘pretend.’ Not only are the ‘wars’ trumped up; I don’t even think there are two distinct sides. These days, women and men move in and out of the workforce multiple times, for all sorts of reasons. Economic necessity? In! Layoffs? Out! Unbelievable opportunity? In! Serious illness? Out! Sometimes there’s choice involved; all too often, there’s not.

My point is that any parent who works outside the home today could easily be a stay-at-home parent down the road—and vice versa. The so-called camps in these so-called wars are about as fixed as intramural soccer teams: if we’re wearing uniforms at all, they’re merely pinnies.

3. They’re distracting. We don’t need fake wars—there are plenty of real conflicts to tackle. As our robot overlords will no doubt point out to us some day, we humans have all sorts of needs competing for the time and attention we might otherwise give to our jobs: yes, there are children to raise, but there are also elderly parents to care for, friendships to nurture, clothes to wash, meals to cook, bikes to ride, communities to tend, mountains to climb, stories to write, hats to knit.

Finding the right balance, both as individuals and as a society, is incredibly difficult—but that’s the work at hand. That’s always the work at hand. Let’s focus on that and confine all the highly-produced catfights to the place where they belong: Season 17 of The Bachelor.