He told them that in later years they would appreciate the choice they’d made—to make a difference instead of making a killing. They don’t call it making a killing for nothing—the effort to do it ends in killing the spirit in us, and not infrequently, our bodies as well.
My work with the organization Take Back Your Time has shown me that many of the people who work the longest hours in America are doing it primarily for the money. The Wall Street traders brag of their hundred hour weeks. But San Francisco physician Bart Sparagon told me such people are racing toward a heart attack. And even if they survive, and make millions, what will they be missing in their lives?
Now it’s true you can work hard and long for things that matter—a cure for cancer, for example. But that’s not the general rule. The saddest thing about the horribly overworked Amazon employees, whose stressed lives were examined in a recent New York Times article, was that they weren’t even putting these hours in for something essential—like a doctor working overtime to save lives—but for a goal breathlessly banal, getting a package to the door of an inpatient customer a couple of hours earlier than they used to be able to.
Yet even if the goal is admirable and the work is great fun, you can have too much of a good thing. Like chocolate, for example. Well, on second thought, maybe you can’t have too much chocolate. But people often say to me “If I love my job, isn’t it OK that I work 80 hours a week.” And I have to respond that if they are working such hours, it’s surely better if they love their job than hate it.
But still, what might they think in twenty years? Maybe then they will have lost their job in a layoff, or if they are entrepreneurs, maybe they will have lost their clients. Will they then look back with regret that they didn’t make time for friends or to have a family? The saddest pain of all is loneliness, and America is becoming a very lonely country. A December 2010 TIME/AARP study found that the percentage of Americans who could be characterized as “chronically lonely” rose from 20 to 35, a near doubling, in the period from 2000-2100 alone.
So when you think about making your mark, think first about what kind of mark you want to make. As they say, no one says on their deathbed that they wished they’d spent more time in the office or more time making money. They’ve usually become wise enough to know that time well spent and the mark worth making is time spent making a difference, serving others, experiencing the beauty and wonder of the world and tending to relationships.
John de Graaf is an author,award-winning documentary filmmaker and president of Take Back Your Time, an organization fighting overwork and time poverty in America.