A few years ago, I noticed I began needing the help of an alarm clock to wake me up to go to work. Then I started needing two or three coffees throughout the day to help me stay alert. This was not a good sign since coffee helps to focus and concentrate on linear and repetitive tasks, but it harms creativity, which depends precisely on non-linear thoughts. Not ideal for someone who had an advertising agency. My mind didn’t know yet that it was a sign that I was unsatisfied with something, but my body already knew something was wrong.
Another thing I felt that wasn’t going particularly well for me was the time I spent with my family. Like most of us, I’ve always said that my family was my priority. But like most people around me, the time I spent with them was just the leftovers of minutes, hours, and days not taken up by work: the leftovers of the day, when tired at night, the leftovers of the week, on Saturdays and Sundays. Anyone who studied my calendar could add up the waking hours I devoted to my family and the hours I devoted to work and see where was my real priority. My children were growing up barely knowing their father, except as that strange tired guy who comes at night and pays all the bills. Often, between leaving earlier to stay with my family or working an extra hour to earn more money, I was clearly choosing Scrooge McDuck.
In the beginning, I used the story that time dedicated to work could, somehow, be counted as time dedicated to family; after all, I was working to bring home the bacon. And for many years, it was easy for me to fool myself with this fallacy, mostly because everyone around me was using it. But over time, it was getting harder and harder for me to believe that excuse. Family time is supposed to be family time. And I wasn’t there.
Furthermore, work was also harming the little time I had with my kids. After a stressful day or hard week at work, I knew that my mind wasn’t entirely there when I was with them. I had recently learned that children who have parents who are often stressed, grow up feeling alone with their emotions and turn up to be teenagers that feel like no one understands them. This phenomenon of physical proximity but emotional distance is called ‘proximate separation’. It happens when children notice (and they do notice!) that despite their parents being physically present their heads are somewhere else. According to Dr. Gabor Maté, the levels of physiological stress experienced by the child during moments of this ‘proximate separation’ approach the levels experienced during actual physical separation. It means that when we are with our kids but thinking about working or holding our phones, it’s as if we aren’t even there. I was fooling no one.
It didn’t help that the kids were growing up and starting to ask about my work, grilling me on it at times. Indeed, I was already feeling unhappy on the job, but I didn’t know that part of that discouragement came from the kind of work I was doing: making people spend their hard-earned money on things they didn’t need.
Work, in addition to sustaining us, also has the function of animating our lives. In my case, it was draining me. And I didn’t want my kids to think it was okay to work at something that didn’t bring joy. More and more, I saw older relatives and friends paying with their health the cost of not loving what they did. Not just depression and anxiety but cancers, high blood pressure, and autoimmune diseases that have their origins built in the hours of life spent doing something that was not your passion.
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