everyone suffered from the stress of not doing enough, or the possibility of doing more, or at least feeling good and guilty about it. (This soon included myself.) It was as if anxiety were the tithe paid to the gods of the work ethic in lieu of more concrete sacrifices. After all, everything was at stake in American careers: big promotions, big money, big homes. And if you didn’t succeed in ‘making it’, as the colloquial phrase had it, you had only yourself to blame.