Today's Wall Street Journal "Cubicle Culture" column by Jared Sandberg is entitled
- Workaholics Use Fibs, Subterfuge to Stay Connected on Vacation
In it, Sandberg addresses a fundamental dilemma of our modern-day life: how is it possible to control rather than be controlled by the very technology that makes our lives possible?
Here's his excellent piece:
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- You never would have guessed Jodi Burack was vacationing last week in South Carolina.
When she received an e-mail from me last Friday asking if she was doing work during her time off, she responded within 10 minutes.
"Well, there was an outage of service," she pecked back on her BlackBerry. "I was nuts calling my office too much."
But then the service was finally restored, and she was barraged with more than 200 e-mails.
"My husband was playing golf. Did not catch me but we are with friends and they grabbed the pager away," she typed.
The attitude of family and friends forces Mrs. Burack to do what any self-respecting nonrelaxer must do: deceive, beguile and swindle.
Last March in Hawaii, for example, her husband expressed shock that she hadn't brought her BlackBerry.
But "I had it," she admits. "I was hiding it." She used it when everyone else was asleep, and if they weren't, she would sneak into the bathroom or the closet. The closet? "Oh, yeah, that's nothing," she says.
Some people just can't take a real break from work.
Harboring an abiding certitude that something tragic will happen when they aren't looking - including possibly to them - they spend great sums and drive great distances dowsing for a few bars of cellular signal or BlackBerry link.
Loved ones, though, rarely understand that the very possibility of missing something big at the office is more tragic than spending hard-earned money to effectively set up a satellite office beachside.
That forces the helplessly connected to abandon all semblance of dignity just to get their fix. It's another sign of how much work can contaminate leisure.
Workaholism is nothing new, particularly in a nation founded by people who distrusted idleness.
"Everybody who's observed American culture, beginning with de Tocqueville, has said that Americans are uneasy with leisure," says Geoffrey Godbey, a professor of leisure studies at Pennsylvania State University.
The difference is that now people have a way to calm themselves when a vacation is packed with too much fun: "New technologies make it easier [to channel] those impulses," the professor says.
In June, Bryson Koehler, a director of Internet services at a hotel company, went with his extended family to Hilton Head, S.C., where he discovered that only in one corner of his parents' bathroom would his BlackBerry and wireless laptop connection work.
Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
I think you made all of the right decisions, including coming back on a substantially altered basis. A site based upon what you shared here would be excellent in and of itself. Take care of yourself.
2 - Tom Johnson
I often wonder if the internet hasn't made life worse for people, in general. Sure, it's a great resource, but being connected all the time can be a real problem because there's always one more thing to look at and do, one more price to check, one more new thing to discover. I always find that once I get on the computer I spend far too much time glued to it doing, essentially, totally meaningless things. Do I really need to spend all that time reading the Fark forums, for instance?
I took a blogging break a while back, too, killed off my old site and decided I'd get back into it when I felt like I actually missed it. Like Eric says above, post what you care about, who cares about hits or popularity? The upside of this is that I loosened up my rules - my writing is much more free-style, I don't labor over it as much, and I've found that I actually enjoy reviewing music again, something I'd gotten really sick of. I just had to set some new, smarter rules and really abide by them. Number one was post when I want to, not when I felt I should (like everyday to make sure I had fresh content.) Number two was post what I want, not what I think people want to read. Who cares, really? It's my damned site and it's my reading. If I'm not having fun with it, why would anyone else be? In the end, I'm happier, in general, and I spend less time online than I did before. Of course, my hits have taken a slugging, but that's okay. Quality, not quantity.
3 - Eric Olsen
very pertinent and wise Tom - I think ultimatley what we each have to do is set priorities.
It's also easy to forget what a new medium the Internet is - people went pretty apeshit when TV came along as well - I think it will become just another tool over time as people get used to it and come to take it for granted (like everything else)