Where Do You Squeeze in Life?

Seems to me it's getting harder to squeeze in life around this thing we call work. I know it's not just me; nearly everyone I know surrenders most of their waking hours to stay on top of the demands of their job. What used to constitute the off limits areas of time that was exclusively yours to tend to other parts of your life is now open terrain for work interference. Technology only convolutes this, making accessibility excuses obsolete. You know what? It sucks. When I heard the news that airlines were considering allowing cell phone use on planes, I physically gagged. When is your time really YOURS?

When I was growing up, my parents worked 9 to 5 jobs. And they really were 9 to 5 jobs. They left the house at 8:30. They were home by 5:30. They had bountiful weekends, chock full of family time and leisure activities. They took two week vacations. There was a clear delineation between their work life and their real life. So what happened? Did we adopt the Japanese work ethic? Are we asking fewer people to take on heavier work loads? Has technology eradicated the limitations of communications? Are we part of a global workforce which makes it perfectly valid to participate in a conference call at 2 am? Why yes, of course.

I've noticed a marked increase of e-mails from colleagues timestamped in the middle of the night, which I think is peculiar and patently wrong. Most of the trade shows we attend fall over weekends; on the average, we give up five weekends a year which is time we never get back again. A good deal of my colleagues never use up their annual vacation which can not be rolled over year to year. I'm guilty too--I've lost weeks over the years. It's almost considered a weakness to take vacation these days especially if you travel somewhere exotic where your Blackberry might not have a signal. Which would mean you're not checking in for messages. Which is a sign of weakness and considered indifference on your part.

Today I'm feeling a little fed up with the notion that it's expected that I have to put my life on the back burner. I've done it for years and I'm starting to bristle against the confines. I want to take a vacation. I want to take a vacation without lugging a fucking laptop with me. If I get an e-mail at 11:47 pm on Friday night, I want to answer it (like normal people should) at 8 am on Monday morning. But I don't. No one does anymore.

So why is this affecting me now? I had a conversation at the end of the day today with The Glamazon. We were trying to coordinate schedules for the next six months. She asked when she could schedule vacation time. We started going through our calendars and to my horror, I saw that weeks in my calendar were already earmarked in advance, precious chunks of life already committed to meetings, conference calls, sales calls, trade shows, corporate meetings--I couldn't work out time between now and October that would work. She rightly protested, so we found a window when she could be spared...which now means I need to cover her absence. And so it goes.

Brooding about this very thing on the subway home, I tried to extricate the silver lining because I believe there is always some positive aspect to everything. After many stops, it came to me. In ten years, I will walk away from this rat race. In ten years, I can retire to that house on the beach in the Carolinas and write the novel I always wanted to and not give a rat's ass about technology and meetings and conference calls ever again. I started saving 15 years ago with a vengeance. It was hard at first but now I'm glad I did because I can now see the light at the end of the tunnel. If I can slog through another decade, I can walk away from this and not look back ever again.

That should tide me over.