Oh, for the Untethered Life
from
Summer 2001
by William S. Rukeyser
There I was, resplendent in island togs on a sparkling day in
Bermuda, reclining on a grassy hillside overlooking the ocean and
chattering away to my office back home on my first cellular phone. I
felt that life was good and daydreamed about a future in which, thanks
to technology, I would conduct more and more of my business while
sipping drinks with little umbrellas on patios far from any skyscraper.
George Soros would have nothing on me.
Things haven’t gone precisely as dreamed that day in the ’80s. I still feel, to paraphrase what Winston Churchill said about alcohol, that I have taken more out of technology than technology has taken out of me. But a lot of people don’t. All those cell phones, pagers, laptops, organizers, and voice-mail services are increasingly seen as diabolic cords tethering people to work 24/7. A recent book-length boomer rant called White-Collar Sweatshop puts it this way: “The overwork, stress, and insecurity of today’s workplaces [have] been exacerbated, not relieved, by the proliferation of high-tech equipment … that help[s] people try to keep up with growing workloads while also making it impossible for them to fully escape their jobs and relax.”
Certainly the world of work is stressful now, maybe even exceptionally so, and the tethering technologies add to the pressure. But other causes are important, too. A decade and a half of downsizing hasn’t been conducive to job joy. And tensions between the demands of jobs and families have proliferated along with the two-income family; 60.1% of American women were working or looking for work this spring, up from 43.2% 30 years ago. Moreover, one reason the average white-collar worker’s job may be more demanding than in the past is that it’s also more interesting and responsible, partly because of the decline of boring clerical jobs below and redundant middle-management jobs nearby.
The best antidote to nostalgia for the good old days of low-stress work is a decent memory. Anxiety and even plain fear have rarely been absent from economic life, and you don’t have to reach back to medieval serfdom, Dickens, or even the Great Depression to confirm that. The ’50s were the heyday of the Organization Man, who was encouraged to submerge himself in the organization and whose family had to grin and bear I.B.M. (I’ve Been Moved). Before acres of e-mails there were mountains of pink phone messages greeting the returning traveler. And before beepers there was the telephone with a demanding boss at the other end of the line. In the ’60s, employees only half-jested that the hyperkinetic New York conglomerator Charlie Bluhdorn bought Paramount Pictures so he’d have more time zones to wake people up in.
We are going to have to figure out how to control tethering, just as we previously tamed telephones and telegrams. One surprising role model is the family doctor, formerly famous for open-ended office hours followed by sleep-shattering emergency calls. That was then. Today many primary care physicians keep pretty regular hours, leaving most of the night calls to partners and much of the care of their patients who are hospitalized to specialized staff doctors known as hospitalists.
It’s hard to argue that business people are more indispensable to their clients and colleagues than doctors are to their patients. But since business is not based on received science, its practitioners may be less interchangeable than doctors. Even so, efforts to find reasonable ways to divide tasks can pay off in the office as they have in the examination room. The path of least resistance begins with eliminating self-inflicted tethers. Most jobs, most of the time, don’t really require instant reaction to every e-mail or voice mail, or having a live cell phone at the ready during the fish course.
Where irrational demands exist, change will come in the messy, uneven way that it usually does in organizations. It will be spearheaded by the most powerful workers—those considered crucial—if they care, and reinforced by others speaking their minds, complaining, quitting. Since the notion that businesses will thrive for long if employees have no time to themselves is ridiculous, it too will pass.
Meanwhile, if you need me, try a grassy island. I’ll be the one invoking the poetry of Keats by looking around with a wild surmise, silent, upon a peak.
Except I’ll be anything but silent, what with my cell phone and all.
