Dissatisfaction. You can sense it everywhere. The office, the playground, the wine bar, those hideous home shopping parties. But nobody talks about it. We touched on it here:
“Like many 40-something, middle class women, my life looks good on paper. And it is…I have no reason, no right really, to complain…But I’m so tired all the time. I go from home to work and back again with barely any time to think… . I am fueled by two pots of coffee and a modest dose of Prozac every day yet I still can’t get out of my rut.”
Women rarely give voice to the feelings. We think we must be spoiled – aren’t we lucky to even have these problems? But we’re wondering if this is all there is. Did we pursue the wrong goals? What can we do about it now? We’ve already invested so much. But we are the lucky ones – the women who can have a career, a family, and pursue personal passions- so why aren’t we satisfied?
Undecided: How to Ditch the Endless Quest for Perfect and Find the Career and Life–That’s Right for You, a new book by Barbara Kelley and Shannon Kelley, explores “choice overload,” and how women today – blessed with so many more choices than the generations before us – can learn to navigate this uncharted territory and choose the life that fits our individual needs, not some charicature of the modern woman.
On their blog, the authors ask:
Is there a part of you that’s just a tad envious of women your grandma’s age, whose choices ran the gamut from A-B?
Why do you do what you do? How did you decide to do it? What do you wish you were doing instead? And what’s stopping you?
Great questions.
Since I wrote about my own dissatisfaction, I ditched the job -and the meds, pursued my dream job – and made no money, returned to my “career” so I could pay the bills, and am now melding my money work with my passion work. On paper, it looks crazy. But it works for me.
The following is excerpted from Undecided: How to Ditch the Endless Quest for Perfect and Find the Career and Life–That’s Right for You, by Barbara Kelley and Shannon Kelley and available from Seal Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2011. ch
As good ideas often are, this one was born of sweat and booze.
We began this trek on the Dipsea Trail, a notorious Northern California hike that starts in Mill Valley, a small town just past the Golden Gate Bridge. The trail begins with a wicked climb up 650 steps carved into a hillside and ends a brutal (and lovely) seven miles later (and after a 2,200-foot climb and descent) on the other side of Mount Tamalpais, at the tiny town of Stinson Beach on the coast of the Pacific Ocean.
We’d begun the day talking about a phenomenon we’d noticed again and again in women of the postfeminist generation—a general malaise with symptoms that are a combination of “analysis paralysis,” “grass is greener” syndrome, and a sense that there are far too many choices to deal with. It was a mystery, yet it seemed an indisputable touchstone of the zeitgeist: women who, despite apparently having it all (good education, great job, cool place to live), are miserable. And for a reason they seem unable to quite put their finger on.
Sure, it could be easy to dismiss these ladies as spoiled. Here they have everything their mothers had ever dreamed of. And yet, the angst is real. And universal. These are women who were bred for success. And seem to be miserable because of it.
By the time we’d come down the mountain and crawled to the nearest bar to grab a beer (it was a sunny day in September, after all; it practically demanded an ice-cold Hefeweizen with a slice of lemon), we knew we wanted to explore this phenomenon. And later that night—as often happens when you combine an exhausting hike, iced knees, and a glass or two (okay, maybe three) of pinot noir—an idea took shape.
This mystery, let’s investigate it. Talk to these women. Find the research. What are the causes? Is there a fix? We wanted to connect the dots. Get to the bottom of what seemed to be a generational epidemic of chronic indecision. And invite the reader along for the ride.
As backstory, Barbara had written a short op-ed on “choice overload” for the Christian Science Monitor a few months before, noting what she’d noticed in her students, her kids, their friends, and her friends’ kids. The op-ed was picked up by her university’s alumni magazine, and the response was overwhelming: “That’s me!” “That’s my daughter!”
But, Shannon insisted during that hike, just documenting the malaise in an eight-hundred-word editorial piece couldn’t even scratch the surface. It’s so juicy, she said. Let’s dig deeper, lots deeper. Let’s get to the bottom of it. And thus, Undecided was born.
And soon, it took on a life of its own.
And once it began taking shape, Shannon too found the response to be torrential. Her friends, their friends, near-strangers she’d meet at a party, would all pull her aside to confess: This thing you’re talking about, this book you’re writing. That’s me!
We’d tapped a universal issue and we knew it. A few months later, we started our blog on the subject, and from day one were rewarded with comments—some funny, some heartfelt, all breathtakingly honest—from women throughout the country, weighing in on the ways in which they felt sabotaged, by everything from the opportunities (and mirages) of a postfeminist society to their own expectations.
Once we started our trip, our investigation took several routes. The first was shared experience: We talked to hundreds of women—Millennials, Gen-Xers, Baby Boomers—across the country and listened to their stories. We dug into the research to understand what goes on in our brains when we try to choose between Door No. 1 and Door No. 2—and why no matter what we choose, we’re often dissatisfied. We explored the very nature of happiness, and why it can be so elusive. We explored why it is we sometimes find ourselves caught up in the chase for the symbols of someone else’s definition of success. We talked to the experts, both the folks in the trenches and academics, too: men and women who could explain some of the issues—societal and otherwise—that underlie our dissatisfaction, and who could offer insight, perspective, even solutions.
We thought deeply (okay, and argued, too) about the weight of great expectations, the insidious lie of “having it all,” and the illusion of unlimited options on women who had not yet learned to deal with them.
What we found were growing pains: It may be great to have options, but until we learn how to deal with them, life can be a bitch.
We also found prescriptives, including the route to the simplest and yet most profound remedy of them all: Know yourself.
Along the way, we came across a couple of media firestorms—an idea that if women were unhappy, well, feminism was to blame. What we found was that if anything, feminism hasn’t gone far enough: We’re living in an unchanged world whose reality turns out to be a far cry from the messaging we’re fed. (We’ll go there.) … We also were asked, more times than we can count, why this dissatisfaction, this indecision, was a woman’s issue. Weren’t young men equally undecided, dissatisfied? Equally stressed out? Why women? To which we answered: It’s generational. Men have been raised for generations to go, seek and conquer; to succeed in a workplace designed expressly by and for them. For women, there’s a layer of newness to it all: We’re going forth without either a net or enough role models to pave the way. Sure, men can be equally angsty in the face of choices, and we appreciate that, but for women, this angst, this indecision, this trial and error is a product of less than fifty years of progress. It’s uncharted territory.
I am so out of balance this week. Work has been very busy. I haven’t run. I hadn’t blogged (until now). I’ve played a few rounds of Farkle Frenzy with the kids but haven’t had any meaningful conversations with them. I just found out Rick Perry dropped out of the presidential race. Yesterday, a typical day this week, I woke up at 1:30 in the morning stressing about a work project. I didn’t fall back to sleep until 5. I got up again at 7, got a phone call at 7:55 about an interesting career opportunity, had a root canal at 8, was in meetings from 10 until 4:30, made a decision and a call about the career opportunity at 4:45, answered emails until 7, drove home, ate dinner and worked until 11. So how ironic that today I was the guest on Betty Everything sharing tips on balancing work and life.
