The Inside of Aging: Disappointment with Work

This is #15 in a series of essays on aging.

Many people live for work. Some neglect family and friends because of the responsibilities of their jobs. They travel too often or work too late. Left with no time to play with their kids or go out to a movie with their spouse, they become one-dimensional. They have no spare time for the fellowship at church or the bowling league.

Why do they put so much into their work? For lots of different reasons. Sometimes supporting their family requires two jobs. They’ve been raised to believe that it’s a strength test: real men and real women work 60 hours a week (their fathers did). Their egos get involved in who is top dog at the office. They find work emotionally less complicated than dealing with spouse and children.

Stereotypically, this is a male problem. If you broaden your thinking, however, you’ll realize that women often have the same issues. What’s different is that the work they live for is more likely to have a domestic component, with home and children. Plenty of women become obsessively involved with cooking, cleaning, decorating, child-rearing, and so on.

Overworking is not the worst problem in the world. Great institutions are built, widgets are invented, care is provided by dedicated, hard-working people who love what they do. We need the people who live for work.

Here’s the paradox, however. They love what they do, but sadly, many look back at their years of work with disappointment, once it’s over.

When I was starting out in my career, I found it blissfully astonishing that I could write for a living. Simply working with words was enough to thrill me; I would have gladly done it for free. During my years of school I had hoped that I might actually publish articles and books someday, but the idea had sounded like flying to the moon.

Then I did it—published hundreds of magazine articles and dozens of books. I found extraordinary satisfaction in getting to do what I loved. I made a living at it. I believed I was doing good work and I hoped it contributed to our world. To ask for more would be churlish.

I never thought it would end, and it didn’t, exactly, but it changed. The journal I’d published with for decades stopped calling. Book publishers turned down manuscripts I felt sure they would have eagerly embraced at one time.

I still write—you’re looking at one result—but I can’t deny that my emotions are different. I’m thankful and proud of my life as a writer, but there’s some disappointment mixed in.

I think that’s true of practically everybody, regardless of their success. I see two versions of disappointment. One is the result of a bad ending. People get forced out, fired or laid off. The company downsizes or changes direction and they’re not needed any more. If they are self-employed, their business fails or dribbles away. No matter how nicely this is handled, they land with a thump. And at this point in their life, they don’t get to shake it off and move on. They’re not going to make a new start. They will live with disappointment.

A lot of people experience that kind of disappointment, but they’re probably not going to say so. They put a good face on it, and you’d have to be a pretty good friend to be allowed to see under that face. You sense it, though. There’s a weight of sadness that looms out of the darkness whenever they talk about their work.

Another kind of disappointment is subtler. It’s so slight you might not even recognize it in yourself.

Let’s say you end your working life at the top of your game. At the retirement dinner you are applauded and given a lifetime achievement award. Really, you couldn’t ask for more. Nevertheless, when you come down from the rush, you’re sad. It’s over. You have no more achievements ahead of you. No more awards will be given. In fact, you soon realize, people don’t quite remember what you did. It’s not important to them; they don’t associate it with you at all. Your success, whether big or small, is in the rearview mirror getting smaller and smaller.

Worse, as time passes you yourself come to think less of what you did. It wasn’t as important as it seemed to you while you were doing it. It blends into the terrain.

This disappointment seems to afflict everybody, even those who were stunningly successful. Yes, I won the national championship, but not the Olympic gold medal. Yes, people loved my music, but not like they love Taylor Swift’s.

Very few things—almost none—retain much shine a generation later. Not even for you, who did them. Almost inevitably, what motivated you at the peak of your working life now seems distant and perhaps inconsequential.

Such disappointment afflicts nearly everyone as they grow older. A pep talk won’t make it go away. What is required is a new beginning in life, a different career. You need not devalue what you did before, but you have to recognize that you are on a new stage, which has its own peculiar joys and its own particular achievements.

What can you do today that is meaningful? What tests face you that you must overcome?

It could be, for some, that simply acting cheerful and not complaining is a gigantic mountain to climb. To stop feeling sorry for yourself—or at least, to act like you’ve stopped. To give your family members a break.

It could be that a neighbor, a dog-walker, a child is your special calling: to make friends and offer camaraderie.

It could be that writing your memoirs is the demanding task, so that you can pass on the meaning of your life to your grandchildren and great grandchildren yet unborn. How else will they ever know what you really believed?

It’s up to you. What is your work now?

It’s a question I don’t really care to ask, to tell the truth. The achievements of an old man don’t much appeal to me.

But it’s the question you have to ask, in the country of old age.