More on work

Making the rounds of hot topics this week is an article in the Atlantic by Anne-Marie Slaughter. Why Women Still Can’t Have It All tells the story of a woman who gives up her position as a aide to Secretary of State Clinton to, without euphemism, spend more time with her family.

Slaughter has worked in the rarefied levels of government with lots of hours and lots of travel. She decided that working like this wasn't working for her. It's easy to be skeptical of someone who truly has so many options available. After the first few paragraphs, I was ready to argue that point, but she brought in a number of threads that I thought were good.

Because we expect to live longer than previous generations, it's help to rethink the arc of our careers. We can plan, to the extent that we can plan, to peak later, perhaps in our 50s, rather than in our 40s. We can plan to have multiple, smaller career arcs. In short, we no longer have to calibrate our career against the end marker of at 65. (There are obvious exceptions for work that demands a lot of our bodies.)

This notion also leads to the idea that pushing the Social Security retirement age past 70 for most professions makes actuarial sense. We'll leave that for another day.

Dan Kennedy, in last night's Beat The Press, remarked that The Atlantic has a long, proud tradition of running 12,000 words when 3,000 words would have done just fine. Slaughter's article is much too long and so the most useful point, IMO, shows up somewhere beyond word 8,000. The discussion on BTP is also worth a listen.