The Costs of Work-Life Balance

Roxane Gay of the New York Times has an interesting piece this week on work-life balance, in which she commends the recent trend of people saying no to employers who ask for limitless sacrifices. After confessing that she is a workaholic, she writes, “The expectation that we should go above and beyond for employers who feel no reciprocal responsibility is a grand, incredibly destructive lie” and “it’s why an entire discourse rose around labeling people who are simply doing the jobs they were hired for, nothing more and nothing less, as ‘quiet quitting.’”

My HR professional wife has had to contend with this new way of thinking in our post-shutdown world (I hope post-shutdown). She has managers who are complaining about staff, calling them “lazy” or “not team players” solely because they do the work that’s been asked of them from home rather than in the office. My wife has had to push back.

“Do they do their work well?” 

“Yes.”

“Are they friendly with their co-workers and clients?”

“Yes.” 

“When you ask them to do something do they do it?”

“Yes.”

At which point my wife slaps her palm against her forehead. 

Do we really want people to stop making solid work-life choices that allow them to eat dinner with their children and make it to their after-school activities, if they also meet the essential objectives of their jobs?

Working from home may have some detrimental outcomes – we’ll see how this experiment goes – but so does working oneself to death, and the trend of young people resisting employers who want them to sacrifice their lives is a positive one. At least, it’s positive for the individual and for that individual’s family. I also try to consider things on a more macro level, because as a society we have benefitted greatly from people who are shitty parents but who have a drive to achieve greatness. 

I think of the lyrics to Rush’s song “Mission,” in which lyricist Neil Peart admires the drive and creativity of those who’ve contribute great works of art, film and architecture to our benefit while conceding that there is a cost to the individual, and by extension, that individual’s family.

We each pay a fabulous price
For our visions of paradise

Beethoven, Picasso, Einstein, Hemingway, Frank Lloyd Wright, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, etc. – they’ve all benefitted our society in profound ways, but in many cases they left a trail of oppression and neglect in their wakes.

I view the myopic drive for greatness as akin to owning a boat. I’m glad to have a friend who owns one, but I’d never want the headache of owning one myself. The same can be said of a career that supersedes family. I’m glad some families have had to endure that hardship insofar as the result benefitted the greater good, but I’m sure glad mine isn’t one of them.

MEMORY AND MUSIC TIME TRAVEL

If you’re human you undoubtedly know about the fallibility of memory, how even our most-assured recollections can be put into question or proven entirely false upon further examination.  It’s reassuring then to discover that at least in some cases, my first-hand memory is spot on and confirmable. For someone who loves music and has a penchant for nostalgia (guilty as charged) the miracle of technology allows me to listen back to concerts I attended long ago. And it turns out that at least some of my memory is intact.

I recall that on October 9, 1982, during Rush’s opening song “Spirit of Radio,” vocalist Geddy Lee sang “One likes to believe in the freedom of baseball,” substituting for the word ”music” in honor of the Milwaukee Brewers victory over the Angels in game four of the ALCS earlier that afternoon. I remember it. And now I can validate it, because the entire concert is available on YouTube. When the crowd screams, my fourteen-year-old self is there, unaware that forty years later he’ll be able to access his own applause. Remarkable.

Once I discovered this defining show from my youth, I turned to other concerts from long ago, and it turns out that there are at least seven shows that I attended from 1982-1986 available for streaming. (note: I find that YouTube regularly scrubs live recordings from its vault, and the Genesis concert link is already defunct. Bummer! A new Google search can often lead to an operational link):

Rush, October 9, 1982 (https://youtu.be/xgIhhNabk10)
Genesis, November 10, 1983 (link no longer working)
Yes, March 10, 1984 (https://archive.org/details/Yes_90125_1984-03-10-AnotherTownAndOneMoreShow-Milwaukee)
Bruce Springsteen, July 12, 1984 (https://www.guitars101.com/threads/bruce-springsteen-alpine-valley-music-theater-east-troy-wi-july-12-1984.678215/)
Elton John, September 9, 1984 (https://youtu.be/G51mCqcd_r0)
Tom Petty, June 23, 1985 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNviPMup2wA)
Rush, March 24, 1986 (https://youtu.be/M4kyxrp4N1E)

Before YouTube deleted the recording, I was able to confirm that during the Genesis show in 1983, Mike Rutherford had to sit out a good chunk of the song “That’s All” because of technical difficulties, and that the singer Phil Collins encouraged the audience to plug their ears and repeat the phrase, “Masturbation will not make me deaf.”

For the Yes concert in 1984, I distinctly recall Tony Rabin accidentally adding harmony vocals to a verse of the song “Hearts” (the “Many moons cascade one river…” section) quickly dropping out when realizing his mistake, and he and bassist Chris Squire cracking up as a result. I’m listening to the concert now, and…there it is! The blunder!

The guy who posted the Elton John concert calls it, “Elton John, Stoned in Alpine Valley” and includes this description: “Although there are some contenders for this, I still consider this Elton’s most drug-fueled show.” And now I can listen to his drug-fueled performance as if Elton’s sobriety is still a decade on the horizon. (It’s also fun to think that this was supposed to be his “final American tour.” The dude’s most recent farewell tour has been going on for over four years!)

I also appreciate that my memory of setlists is sometimes more accurate than what I can find on websites that archive such things. For Supertramp’s 1983 concert from Alpine Valley, Wisconsin, I reviewed the entry on setlist.fm and immediately knew it wasn’t correct because I remembered the band performing “Waiting So Long” and “Child of Vision.” Sure enough, I just checked the notes I wrote after the show, and both of these tunes were played. Unfortunately, I can’t find any recordings on-line of the Wisconsin show or any other shows with a similar setlist. The Internet has its limitations.

But not as many limitations as memory itself. Hell, I attended a Jimmy Buffett concert with my future wife and brother-in-law in 1993, and until one of them mentioned it to me a few years ago I had no recollection of even having been there! Worse, I’ll have a discussion with a friend today and forget the contents by the day’s end. A few weeks ago I was trying to recall the name of the actress “Carey Mulligan” and it eluded me. This morning I spoke to my mom, a nurse of over four decades, and she had trouble accessing the word “autoimmune.”

I’m looking forward to the day when physicians are able to employ a defrag of our internal hard drives, allowing us to access memories accurately and quickly like Jeopardy champions. But until then, most of us will have to muddle on through life knowing that while a portion of our recollections have some truth to them, many fall in a gray area somewhere between truth and fiction.

How gray?

Say it with me Fletch fans.

Charcoal.

Life's Meaning and Selfish Pursuits

Speaking with my mother on the phone a few weeks ago, she lamented the aches and pains that she and her older friends have been experiencing lately, concluding that today’s elderly are dealing with issues that their parents never encountered because they’re “living too darn long.” While my mother is certainly still active and enjoying various activities, she feels like she’s no longer living a “purpose-driven life,” borrowing a phrase from Rick Warren’s best-selling book. Aside from doing some tutoring and volunteering at a hospital, she doesn’t feel like she’s truly contributing to society or the greater good.

I don’t know that one has to actively contribute to society to live a meaningful life, but I’ve been ruminating about this ever since our conversation. I too am wrestling with what a meaningful existence entails. Back in 2017, I wrote a few blogs that tackled this subject, and I seemed more assured of the answer than ever before. I wrote:

Learn. Explore. Volunteer. Start a hobby. Help others. Learn an instrument. Love, and experience joy with the ones you love. Learn a craft. Grow something. Learn a language. Have fun with friends. And perhaps most importantly, enjoy the little miracles around you every day. 

But for me, 2022 has been a year of saying “no” to things. I resigned from my two biggest volunteering activities: picking up food for a local food pantry and serving on my synagogue’s board. At the end of the summer I am leaving one of my bands, and I’ve also given up baseball this year, having watched not one game this season in person or on TV, an act of defiance which provoked the following response from an old friend of mine: “Oh shit, this is getting real.” It is kind of! I’m used to watching over a hundred games a year. This year I’ve probably freed up somewhere around 300 hours to pursue other things.

But what things, exactly? As a friend of mine once said of retirement: you can’t just retire from something, you have to retire to something. And if 2022 is the year for me to say no to some things, I’m also going to have to say yes to other things. 

So far, it’s a little unresolved, and I echo my mother’s thoughts that perhaps I’m not living a purpose-driven life. But the thing is, I’m happy to have walked away from a few of my volunteer activities. It was time. I’m at peace with leaving one of my bands. It was time. I don’t miss baseball in the least, something I couldn’t fathom saying a few years ago. But what will I walk towards?

I have friends whose purpose in life seems to be to enjoy life itself. Is that enough? It’s a self-centered pursuit for sure, but damn, they seem pretty happy, and after spending years and years doing what I thought I should do, I’m kind of enjoying just doing what I want to. I’m recording a new album that few people will ever hear. I’m playing in a few bands. I’m reading books more proactively. I’m tackling home maintenance projects. I’m reaching out to friends and family, attending concerts, enjoying food and taking walks with my wife and dog.

Is that enough? It isn’t noble. It’s perhaps not the life I can sustain for long before I tell myself to get back in the game and – as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. described in his novel Dead-Eye Dick – stop living life as epilogue and get back to adding to one’s story. It’s tricky. My mom probably feels like her life is epilogue – that her life story is over now. I’m 29 years younger than my mom, and in some ways I’m living a life that’s “short on story and overburdened with epilogue.” But I’m enjoying it except for the part of me that feels guilty for enjoying it! 

For now, I’m going to try to give myself permission to pat myself on my back for twenty years of parenting and volunteering and say it’s okay to have a reprieve. To reset. To just breathe for a while and let my whims take me where they may. Eventually I’ll find something to say yes to, that excites me.

This meaning of life stuff is tricky, whether you’re 83 or 54. It really never gets any easier.

The Absence of Physical Engagement

I have a vivid recollection from my teenage years of observing a neighborhood couple seated on their front yard, using weed pullers to extract dandelions from their lawn. I remember looking at them with contempt and thinking, “If I ever consider weeding my lawn a day’s accomplishment, shoot me.” If I had flashed forward thirty years, I would have observed the 50-something version of me happily pulling weeds from his yard. In fact, I’m pretty sure if the fifteen-year-old me could see me today, he’d probably blow his brains out. But the thing is, I’m happy being the fifty something version of me, and tinkering in the yard or in my workshop is – for me – one of life’s simple pleasures. Sure, by the middle of August I want autumn to arrive and cajole my yard into dormancy, but the joys of spring are undeniable.

But a little yard work is a far cry from mankind’s roots. For most of us, the days of hunting, gathering, farming, cutting, chiseling and building are long gone. For the past several hundred years, we’ve done everything we can to delegate our active engagement with our natural surroundings to machines or to other people. I think of the stereotypical commercials from the 1950s geared toward housewives, touting the benefits of a vacuum cleaner or dishwasher and how much time will be freed up as a result, but of course the trend to free our time started long before the post-war years, and we’re all active participants.

Few of us grow our own food. Even fewer of us create our own fabric and sew our own clothing. Not many of us can build our own homes or the furniture and household items in it. And so what, right? Mankind has flourished largely as a result of the increased efficiency of specialization. If experts take care of many of our day-to-day activities, then we can become experts in some other activity, and society as a whole benefits.

But I do wonder what’s been lost along the way, and I wonder if there is any limit to our avoidance of manual and mental labor. Those of us with yards may no longer cut our lawns, plant flowers, lay down mulch, rake leaves or shovel our driveways or sidewalks. Others may have a cleaning service for their home’s interior. Some of us no longer shop for food or other items, having them delivered to our doors instead, and most of us outsource cooking to restaurants on a regular basis. Some hire nannies or daycares to look after their children and hire tutors to manage their kids’ homework or to prepare them for college entrance exams. We may have someone else managing our finances and preparing our taxes. We may also outsource teaching things like driving, playing an instrument, playing sports, etc. And while it might make great sense to hire a company to, say, pour concrete for our driveways or rewire our homes, many of us can’t install a ceiling fan, outlet, toilet or faucet. Even the easiest of activities like painting a room are often outsourced.

And billions of people are now living in urban environments that bear no resemblance to the natural environments that our ancestors tended to. Is there something innate in humans, some connection with the Earth that’s been lost as a result?

I imagine there are loads of anthropological studies on this subject, but I’ll be damned if I know the correct key words to search for them. I couldn’t find anything relevant when I searched for articles that apply to this blog entry. But here’s my hunch:

I believe that man’s evolution away from physical engagement results in a disengagement from and a loss of empathy for our fellow human beings, the environment, and Earth itself. I think there’s some primal need we have to engage with the ground we walk upon, the air we breathe, and the waters we sail, and in foregoing engagement with our environment, we are likely denying ourselves our most meaningful existence.

I know, I sound like fricking Henry David Thoreau from Walden, a book I tried to read three times as a young adult and hated it, never getting past more than a few chapters. I wonder now if it might speak to me.

Nevertheless, those of us who can afford to write and read this blog entry have likely achieved the goal that mankind set out centuries ago: loads of free time so that we can achieve great ends. I’ve always claimed that creativity required two things: time and silence. Agatha Christie once said, "I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness - to save oneself trouble.” After all, we probably don’t get Monet, Beethoven, Picasso, Frank Lloyd Wright, Hemingway, Martin Luther King, and The Beatles if they are busily tilling their farms for survival. 

On the other hand, long before Agatha Christie, the Bible’s book of Proverbs stated, “Idleness is the devil’s workshop,” and I think there’s something to this as well. Would an 18-year-old ever consider gunning down people in a Buffalo grocery store if he was tending to his crops?

Fortunately, most of us don’t go to such wicked lengths to fill our time. Instead, we play Wordl, watch gameshows and sports, read blogs, drink, snort and inject foreign substances, watch porn, get spoon-fed soundbites on social media, and happily believe whatever lies we’re told with nary a glimmer of critical thinking.

It just might be that using weed pullers to extract dandelions from your yard could be the cure that ails you.

WORDLE STRATEGIES

My daughter introduced me to Wordle last week, and in short order I determined that it was probably best to have a strategy or at least consciously choose how I want to play the game going forward. Others have undoubtedly already done this work, but I thought it would be a fun mental exercise to try to come up with the most efficient and successful methods.

To help make these decisions, I thought it best to learn what the 20 most-used letters are in the English language in order of usage. They are:

E A R I O T N S L C U D P M H G B F Y W

(NOTE: an even better bit of information would be to discover the most-used letters in five-letter words, but I’m not sure how to find this information.)

OPENING WORDS

For starters, it might make sense to guess a word that uses as many of the top-five letters as possible.  The word I came up with is RATIO, which is comprised of four of the top-five letters (A R I and O), and also the sixth (T), leaving out only E. Certainly, there are times when none of these letters will be helpful, but if you’re playing the odds, it might be a good method to follow.

Another possible first word might be one with as many highly-used consonants as possible, since vowels might not be as helpful in guessing a word. STERN would likely be a good one, as it uses the four most highly used consonants, plus the most popular vowel.

STRATEGY #1

It seems to me that the most “honest” approach to solving Wordle is to guess an initial word and then use any letters that you’ve guessed correctly in each subsequent guess. For example, if you guessed the word RATIO and Wordle tells you that the A is in the correct place and that there is a T in the word, your second guess would have to keep the A in the second position and use a T somewhere in the word. So perhaps I would guess TAMED for my second entry. This strategy certainly poses challenging scenarios, as sometimes it’s very difficult to come up with a word that uses the correctly-guessed letters, especially after three or more guesses. But that’s not how the game works; Wordle doesn’t force you to use letters that you’ve guessed correctly in subsequent guesses, which opens up the following very interesting scenarios.

STRATEGY #2

Even if I stand firm on using the word RATIO as my first guess, it might now make sense to ignore whatever letters I may or may not guess correctly in my first word and now use as many of the remaining top-ten letters as possible. I can do this by entering the word CLUES as my second guess. The words RATIO and CLUES will use up nine of the top ten most-used letters, substituting U – the 11th most-used letter – for N, so it employs ten of the top eleven letters. If I don’t get the results I’m looking for, a good third guess might be the word HANDY, which uses A once again, but now adds the heretofore unused H, N, D and Y, that latter of which is often a sneaky overlooked vowel in words like CYNIC.

Starting with RATIO, then CLUES and then HANDY, if necessary, might be a good strategy, but it doesn’t use the top fifteen letters; it uses 13 of the top 15 letters, plus Y (and A twice). There might be a better way.

STRATEGY #3

What about trying to use all of the top-15 letters in the first three guesses, regardless of how many letters you guess correctly? If I were to apply this scenario, I could guess the words MENUS, CHARD and PILOT. All fifteen top-15 letters are used. I wouldn’t worry about what letters I guessed correctly in my first two guesses; I’d simply enter these three words and then spend guesses four through six on getting the correct word.

STRATEGY #4

Finally, I might decide that I really want to include the letter Y in one of my first three guesses, since this letter can often be used as a vowel. In this case, I might enter the following words: PRICE, LUSTY and MANGO, which encompasses 13 of the top 15 letters, plus G and Y in place of D and H.

THE HYPOTHESIS

There may be two objectives in determining which strategy to employ: the one that’s most successful and the one that’s most challenging, as sometimes it’s good to make the brain work hard. I believe STRATEGY #1 will be the most challenging, but my guess is STRATEGY #3 will probably be the most successful.

To find out, I’m going to play five games of Wordle using all four methods (plus an additional attempt at Strategy 1 using a different word). Sure, the results won’t be statistically significant, but it’ll be at least a clue into how best to approach the game.

THE RESULTS

I played twenty-five Wordle games, and given my limitation as a wordsmith, here are the results:

Strategy 1A (Starting with RATIO and sticking with correctly-guessed letters) is definitely the hardest, as expected. I got four of five words, but it took a long while, ranging from 100 seconds to over seven minutes (yeah, I know. I was stumped). Now, this strategy may work for someone who’s very quick and clever with words, but for me this didn’t work.

Strategy 1B (Starting with STERN and sticking with correctly-guessed letters) had better results. I got four of five words again, but my times were quicker: from 55 seconds to just over two minutes.

Strategy 2 (Starting with RATIO and CLUES) was very quick when it worked, but it only worked 3 of 5 times. When I guessed correctly, my times ranged from twenty-one seconds to a bit under two minutes. 

Strategy 3 (Starting with MENUS, CHARD and PILOT) was the most successful. I got all five correct – three of them in four turns, which is of course the fewest turns this strategy allows. Additionally, my times were pretty good, with three under a minute, one at 90 seconds, and one that took just over three minutes (and shouldn’t have taken that long. I was being dim.)

Strategy 4 (Starting with PRICE, MANGO and LUSTY) worked pretty well, but not as successfully at Strategy 3. I got four of five correct, ranging from 33 seconds to just under three minutes.

CONCLUSIONS

So which method is best?  In terms of brainpower, I think I would go with Strategy 1A: use RATIO as my first guess and then use any correctly-guessed letters ongoing. If I don’t want to exert myself quite so much, STERN would probably be a better bet.

For speed and wins, Strategy 3 (Starting with MENUS, CHARD and PILOT) appears to be best, though I only tested the methods five times. It may be that strategies 2 or 4 are better over the long haul.

Of course, there are words that will be a challenge regardless of strategy, and sometimes I come upon a word that I simply don’t know. I imagine other players employ slightly different methods for solving their puzzles, but having a strategy is probably a better bet than just winging it.

I’ll likely immerse myself in Wordle for a week or two and then go back to my dreaded crossword puzzles, an art form that I will never remotely master.