PAIN AND BOREDOM: IMPETUSES FOR CHANGE
Despite an immobilizing fear of the unknown that makes tolerating the familiar preferable to risking something new, a man’s work situation sometimes becomes so tiresome or grinding that he feels compelled to think about quitting. His distress becomes a vital force, pushing him to risk more than he might ordinarily dare. Thus long before new goals are formulated, discomfort can serve as an impetus for change.
“I looked around at my colleagues, and nobody was happy, nobody was enjoying himself,” said one forty-four-year-old man whose own desperate boredom finally drove him to quit his job with a large shoe company, and then go on to study architecture. “There was always the low-grade discontent and bitching,” he explained. “You know, ‘Jesus, I have to do this,* and ‘I have to do that.’ All those unhappy people trudging along to their offices, trudging their lives away! It’s sad but it’s true. You can see it in the way they walk—stooped shoulders, dragging feet. Beaten people. I used to be part of it. And then when I couldn’t stand it anymore I stopped being part of it. Now I feel reborn!”
To be reborn this way, propelled toward a revitalizing new commitment, a man must first permit himself to feel the anguish that invariably accompanies working at a job that he no longer likes. Because this message is often telegraphed in tricky ways, however, he must learn to interpret the signals, from his mind and body, that insistently urge him to restructure his life.
Painful physical symptoms are often the first clues. Not long ago, for example, a magazine article portrayed five midlife men who had quit their jobs for something radically different because work that was once enjoyable had now become intolerable.” Each man’s switch was unusual: A salesman from Ohio became a teacher in Alaska; a Chicago stockbroker, fascinated by ecology, earned his doctorate in marine sciences; a Wall Street insurance broker opted for managing an inn in Maine; a Dallas veterinarian chose physical labor on a department store receiving dock; and a New Orleans policeman became a painter.
The most striking note in these stories was that all these men were plagued by disturbing symptoms before deciding to make their move. The salesman found that earning thirty thousand dollars a year had given him a nervous stomach, and kept him on the road four nights a week “going like the hammers of hell.” The veterinarian became so jangled by people tracking him down on the telephone at all hours that he chose simple manual labor to avoid such tensions. The insurance broker said the commuter’s grind not only caused him to drink and smoke and eat too much, but also fanned his anger to the point where he began saying “awful things” in sales meetings—and then ripped an office phone from the wall and even punched someone before deciding to quit.
As for the policeman, his work in the homicide division was so demanding that he rarely saw his family and hadn’t had a real vacation in years. Exhausted from overwork, he finally slammed his fist into a wall, breaking two fingers, because “everything became too much.” One month later he quit and turned to painting.
Such stories illustrate that an awareness of the appalling toll taken by doing unsatisfying work is a crucial first step toward new alternatives. Whether psychic or physical, pain is generally a signal that something is wrong, that change is needed. Thus a man should pay attention to the messages of distress that his body sends. If he is consistently impatient and irritable, if his anger level has escalated dramatically, if he is eating or drinking or smoking too much, if he develops high blood pressure or an ulcer—these may be signs that his work situation has become destructive.
Sometimes the signs arc even more subtle. No obvious aches or ailments, no violent outbursts or dramatic mood changes. Instead, a man may be dispirited but not realize that something is wrong because he has trouble even admitting that he feels down.
“That’s part of the male narcissism,” says psychiatrist Bernard Hall. “We live with an idealization of what we should be as men more than women do, and we expect there isn’t anything we can’t handle. It’s a foul blow to pride, especially for the All-American guy who’s had a successful life, to be so depressed at forty-five he’s close to tears.”
In his experience, says Hall, the key problem is usually boredom at work, although most men who consult him with the mid-life blues are often out of touch with their own feelings of boredom and unhappiness. Instead they are usually drinking too much and inclined to blame something outside themselves, like company policy or the new president. A great believer in career diversity, Hall says he is struck by the fact that many men of this generation are so security-bound that they cling to a job even when it’s driving them crazy. By challenging a man on whether he really must stay in the same situation, Hall makes him consider more stimulating opportunities—a tack that often leads to productive changes.
Hall’s convictions come from personal experience. After twenty-five years of working with patients at the Menninger Clinic in Kansas, he grew restless and then became “deeply depressed.” Determined to improve matters, he explored other job possibilities for several years before shifting gears, at age fifty, to become head of the Community Mental Health Center at New York’s Roosevelt Hospital.
“It takes an awful lot of guts to pull yourself out of someplace where you’ve won your spurs, and cut out to a new situation where you’re unknown,” he acknowledges. “So I use this experience in a personal, anecdotal way with patients to let them know other guys have done it—and they can too.”
After many years of doing the same kind of work, almost all men suffer from a sense of stagnation. Not even clergymen are immune to mid-life depression, and the confusion that usually accompanies it, as Rev. Clarke Kimberly Oler, parish priest of Manhattan’s Church of the Holy Trinity, testifies:
This is the third church I’ve served, and I’m forty-six now. I’ve enjoyed my parish work very much, but in the last two or three years I have increasingly questioned where I go from here. I’m not thinking so much of leaving the ministry, but I don’t feel too turned on by the idea of just going to another parish and doing the same thing.
I’ve changed places but never changed direction. Now I’m beginning to ask questions about changing direction. I don’t know exactly where these feelings of dissatisfaction came from, but I think the fact that I’ve been here ten years now precipitated some of the questioning.
I’ve also come to the conclusion that it has something to do with my time in life. My age. I keep feeling in my head that forty-five is the big crucial time, kind of a watershed age. I have the feeling that the number of options open to me have suddenly narrowed very dramatically. Earlier in my life I felt that I could do anything I wanted, and that if after being a parish minister for a while I didn’t like it, or wasn’t good at it, or was unhappy, than I could just go into something else. But now I don’t have that sense of having all those doors open and available to me.
Anyway, about a year ago I began to feel quite depressed. Actually I didn’t even realize it at first. I just felt kind of anxious and very hyperactive, I guess. And then one of my good friends who is a psychiatrist was having dinner with us one night, and he said, “You know, you seem really depressed.” He picked up little signs. He picked up the hyperactive thing and the heaviness in my manner—like I didn’t seem to be enjoying myself and wasn’t laughing as much. And irritability— things like that.
He suggested I come in and talk to him, and we had a few sessions together, and he recommended therapy for me on the basis that I was exhibiting symptoms of clinical depression and should work it through. So T did go into therapy for six months, and T began to realize that some of my feelings and some of the depression had nothing to do with the vocational pressure, but rather with other conflicts. So I began to work on some things which were long overdue—which was really very helpful to me.
The psychiatrist pointed out that when you get depressed and you don’t have any way of dealing with your depression, one way of reacting is to get busier. And all you experience is the busyness—the sense that you’ve got to keep all these appointments, got to keep moving. The therapy allowed me to experience the depression, too. And then to be able to move with it, and live with it, and explore how to work out of it.
After working through his depression, Rev. Oler made another constructive move by seeking career counseling. This helped him take a good, hard look at himself and begin to sort out his priorities for the future, as he explains:
When you’ve been in a situation as long as I’ve been in the ministry you lose a lot of perspective on yourself—and you even begin to wonder if you’ve been a misfit all those years. And that was the kind of thing that was disturbing me at one level of my life. So another thing I did was to go to the Northeast Career Counseling Center ifl New Jersey—which is an organization set up by churches primarily to help people think through whether they are in the right vocational spot. And if they want to make a move they get a kind of profile on their own interests and abilities as a guide. The process includes some searching questionnaires and a battery of tests.
Going through that, I felt it was really the first time in my life I had any objective data on myself. And what I learned about myself was that parish work is very close to being the thing that I do best and find most satisfying. At least I knew I wasn’t in the wrong slot—and that eliminated a lot of anxiety! So I felt very much reaffirmed, and I got a lot of strength back from that. It didn’t alter the fact that I would still be facing some kind of change in the next few years, but it gave me the feeling that I could take my time a little bit more about working on it. And so I picked up a lot.
One of the ways in which I’ve changed is that I’m less interested and less patient with the administrative side of parish work—which I used to get a big kick out of. Now I want to focus down more and develop some skills more deeply. The sense of being constantly stretched out all over the map in sixteen different things is no longer attractive to me.
The big key question for me right now is to find out where to focus—and how. I think that the area I really want to concentrate on is counseling and group work. I’ve done a lot of this, but I’ve never had time to develop the skills necessary for being a better and more effective counselor. And I’m increasingly resentful of things that block me from doing this. I also enjoy teaching very much, although I have very little chance to do it here.
So I think my next move will be in the direction of counseling—maybe working part-time as a counselor and part-time as a parish minister, with somebody else running the business end. Or maybe into a city agency, or into a school where I can do teaching as well. Right now I’m exploring the kind of training I-would need to make this sort of move.
While investigating this matter of schooling, Rev. Oler ran into two problems that often confront men who want to change direction. The first is that the rigid requirements of many colleges and universities make it hard for an older student to enroll.7 And the second is that men frequently sabotage themselves by imagining they need more formal training than they actually do.
Rev. Oler discovered that one institution he visited, where part-time enrollment had been permitted previously, now demanded three years of full-time work to obtain certification as a pastoral counselor, a change that obviously favored younger men. But he also discovered that he was inventing some difficulties. When he told several colleagues that he couldn’t make a move until he had the proper certification, they said his “need” for a piece of paper reflected his own insecurity about being qualified—but was not realistic. Given his years of experience, they advised, he should simply take a few additional courses and credits. That dialogue was a revelation, says Rev. Oler. It convinced him he didn’t need elaborate credentials, freeing him to explore more flexible alternatives.
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