Married to the Job: Why We Live to Work and What We Can Do About It

by Ilene Philipson Ph.D.

Overview

Do you take your work home with you?

Do you check your work e-mail and voice mail when you're not on the job?

Are your closest friends at the office?

Do you feel guilty when you're sick and can't go to work?

Does time stand still during nonbusiness hours?


If you answered "yes" to any or all of these questions then you — like millions of other twenty-first-century Americans — may be too emotionally invested in your job.
In Married to the Job, clinical psychologist Ilene Philipson explores the idea of the overworked American from a startlingly new perspective. Rejecting the common view that people work solely to keep up with the Joneses and amass material goods, Philipson argues that the modern workplace has become our only outlet for generating feelings of self-worth. Without the praise, the paycheck, and the bonus, life outside the office can often seem flat, unrewarding, and thankless. With this groundbreaking book, Philipson offers brilliant strategies to help ward off the perils of workaholism. By providing keen insight into the ways we seek emotional fulfillment through our jobs, she shows us how we can earn back our lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780743215794
Publisher:	Atria Books
Publication date:	09/09/2003
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Ilene Philipson holds doctorates in both sociology and clinical psychology. She has taught at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and New York University. The author of three previous books, including a biography of Ethel Rosenberg, she currently practices psychotherapy in Berkeley, California, and is a Research Affiliate at the Center for Working Families at UC Berkeley.

Read an Excerpt

Married to the Job

"I can't believe they don't care!" This was Brenda's third session with me, and the same plaintive cry had echoed through my office in our two prior meetings. "I can't believe they'd do this. I feel like there's nothing to live for."

Thirty-five-year-old Brenda sat hunched over in the chair opposite mine. Tears streamed down her face; her eyes were red, swollen; her long blond hair appeared matted in places. She stared out, looking somewhere above my right shoulder. It seemed my function was to bear witness to the tragedy that had unexpectedly seized her and transformed her life into a barren, thinglike existence. Brenda had been betrayed at work and, because of this, she simply saw no point in continuing to live.

When she walked into my psychotherapy office one week earlier, she had sobbed wordlessly for the first twenty minutes of our session. Slowly, in tear-drenched staccato, Brenda was able to tell me the outlines of her fall from grace, her workplace agony. In our second meeting, I gathered the basic sweep of her life history, the history that seemed to have found its culmination in her exile from the law firm in which she worked. I did not know it then, but this narrative of a coherent and productive life suddenly disrupted by a betrayal at work was one with which I would gain increasing and intimate familiarity. It was Brenda's story that began to transform my understanding of the role work plays today in our lives, in the very core of who we are as human beings.

Brenda grew up in an intact, working-class family. Although her father was an alcoholic, and she was one of six children who received little attention from either of her working parents, Brenda graduated high school with honors and immediately began work as a receptionist at age eighteen. During her seventeen years in the labor force, Brenda steadily worked her way up the clerical hierarchy, becoming a legal secretary for a small, very prestigious law firm, earning almost $50,000 per year.

Brenda's life beyond work was stable and relatively free of conflict. She had been divorced for seven years, owned a one-bedroom condominium, and had been in a relationship with a divorced man, Barry, for three years. Brenda described Barry as "very nice . . . , cares about his kids . . . , likes the simple things in life." Brenda's own family lived in another state, so she rarely saw them, given her commitments to work and to Barry.

Brenda idealized the attorneys for whom she worked: Their upper-middle-class lifestyle — season tickets to the opera, weekend homes in the mountains, active involvement in the alumni associations of their alma maters — brought Brenda into intimate contact with a world to which she had no former exposure. "These guys didn't care about money. They assumed it. They cared about better things. They had ideals." One of their "ideals" was continual self-improvement, and, to this end, they paid for Brenda to attend weekend seminars in the Napa Valley once a year to learn how to become "self-actualizing" and more effective at work. In response to this kind of interest in her, her relatively high salary, and her involvement in a workplace that, to her, seemed "about as posh as you can get," Brenda happily worked fifty to sixty hours per week, ran personal errands for her employers, and always spoke of the law firm in the first-person plural: "We're going to court on Monday"; "We had the office painted."

After working at the law firm for four years, Brenda had to miss the annual company Christmas party because her mother had had a stroke two days before. It was Brenda's responsibility to plan and execute the party to which clients were invited, a task she readily assumed, even though it was not part of her job description. After quickly making arrangements with two other secretaries to handle her responsibilities for the party, Brenda flew home to be with her ailing mother. When she returned to work one week later it was as if "my whole world had collapsed." Her employers were very upset with her. There had been a number of foulups at the party, and they blamed them on her ill-timed departure. The attorneys appeared cold and unresponsive in their interactions with her. They began asking another secretary to do their errands, and Brenda's favorite attorney gave this same secretary spare tickets to a sold-out play in San Francisco that Brenda longed to see.

Brenda developed insomnia; she stayed awake at night ruminating about what was happening at the office. She went over and over the way in which she had handled arrangements for the party, and blamed herself for the problems that had occurred, for leaving to see her mother. She developed migraine headaches for the first time in her life, frequently felt nauseated, and began to lose weight. Increasingly, she cried at work. She would sit on the toilet in the women's restroom and sob. There were days when her headaches were so incapacitating that she called in sick. After two months of enduring thisagony, Brenda went to her doctor, who signed her off on short-term disability and referred her for psychotherapy.

Table of Contents

	Introduction	1
Chapter 1	Married to the Job	7
Chapter 2	Less to Come Home to/Less to Go Out to	36
Chapter 3	The Glue That Holds the Self Together	76
Chapter 4	On the Difference Between Eggs and Bacon	112
Chapter 5	Why Women?	148
Chapter 6	Living to Work or Working to Live	183
Chapter 7	Escape from Freedom	218
Appendix	Are You Married to Your Job?	236
	Notes	237
	Acknowledgments	247
	Index	249

What People are Saying About This

Barbara Ehrenreich

If you think women work only because they 'have to,' Ilene Philipson has news for you: Growing numbers of women work long hours because the job has become their central source of community and human interaction. Enlivened with case studies and enriched with wide-ranging scholarship, Married to the Job is a groundbreaking study of workaholism--and of the loneliness that ultimately nourishes it.
— author of Nickel and Dimed

Robert Bellah

Married to the Job is a sobering look at what happens to Americans when, as ties to family and community weaken, they overinvest in the workplace. Philipson holds that the problem lies not so much in the psyches of individuals as in a society where economic aggrandizement has come to dominate every sphere of life. She shows that we need not only individuals who can build a life outside work, but a society that makes the economy the servant, not the master, of a fulfilling form of life. This is a book that comes close to the bone of the way we live now.
— Professor of Sociology Emeritus, UC Berkeley and author of Habits of the Heart

Editorial Reviews

San Francisco Chronicle A cautionary tale, one that reminds us how dangerous it is, in an ever-changing society, to seek our entire sense of self-worth and community at work.

Barbara Ehrenreich author ofNickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America A groundbreaking study of workaholism — and of the loneliness that ultimately nourishes it.

Andrea Sachs Time magazine Provocative [and] well-timed.

From the Publisher

Philipson, a psychotherapist, has written a bleak account of "the problem with no name," or the way employees overinvest in their workplace. She has treated many patients for whom work has become their life and obsession. The author provides numerous case studies that describe how people look to their work for emotional fulfillment, feelings of self-worth, and family connections. They stay late at work, socialize with their colleagues, and thrive on praise from supervisors. When these employees feel snubbed or betrayed by their workplace, they are often incapacitated over their treatment and are unable to return to work. Philipson contends that this is not an individual's problem but society's problem, as society places a higher value on work than leisure. Most of the book focuses on personal stories and the psychological factors behind being "married to your job," but the author does suggest ways to set emotional boundaries at work and become more involved with family and social activities outside of the workplace. This title joins such other workplace studies as Arlie Hochschild's The Time Bind and Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed as an essential purchase for public and academic collections.-Stacey Marien, American Univ. Lib., Washington, DC Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

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