You have to shut yourself down inside yourself to get through this—and Michael uncovered evidence that this affected your whole life.11 The higher up you went in the civil service, he found, the more friends and social activity you had after work. The lower you went, the more that tapered off—the people with boring, low-status jobs just wanted to collapse in front of the television when they got home. Why would that be? “When work is enriching, life is fuller, and that spills over into the things you do outside work,” he said to me. But “when it’s deadening,” you feel “shattered at the end of
...more
