I'm back

I've been out of town, went to TX for the weekend. So, to get caught up:
Work: easy
School: easy
Life: good
and I don't even feel like apologizing for it.

I have been continuing my research on work-life balance, in my quest for figuring out how I got to the state I was in and how it can be prevented in the future. I have now read 3 books on the subject, and related to none of them. The last book was the most interesting. It's called Married to the Job, by Ilene Philipson, a psychotherapist in Silicon Valley. She does not agree that Americans are overworked because of their own consumeristic greed. Instead, her theory is that Americans unconsciously choose to overwork themselves due to a weird over-commitment to their jobs. In other words, something is missing from their personal lives, and so in their minds, they "marry" their jobs. The author ended up seeing 200+ patients over the years, that were referred to her because they felt that their employer had betrayed them in some way, and the impact on their mental health was so profound that they needed medical attention. All of these people had suffered through some kind of event that surely would have been embarrassing or disappointing to anyone. But because they had married their jobs, they felt betrayed to discover that their job hadn't actually married them back. The resulting "divorce" was as mentally stressful as an actual divorce.

I found this fascinating, because although I didn't relate to it myself, 2 people who previously left my employer had described the event as "like a divorce I'll never get over."

I never felt that my employer betrayed me. Quite the contrary, they were always quite supportive and when I missed 5 weeks of work unexpectedly last year, they didn't bat an eye. I think the big difference between me and the crazies were that they were mostly pink collar workers. Their job didn't marry them because frankly, it wasn't dependent on them.