Emptiness: Not So Easy For Everyone

In my recent posts on addiction to overwork, I've expressed the POV of a childless professional. American professionals generally have two choices: work 60-80 hour weeks or don't stay in the profession. Although college professors make much, much less than similarly overworked professionals like lawyers, doctors or corporate managers, they are paid well enough.

Low and minimum wage earners who long for emptiness have a much harder choice than I ever faced: work 60-80 hour weeks or don't eat and don't pay the rent. Add in kids, and it would be much harder to do less work.

In my thirties and forties, I often regretted not having kids. But could I have left my university position if I'd been responsible for a child's life?

I mostly loved the work of a professor (although never the overwork). Then one day while chatting in a colleague's office, I had a vision that seemed to invite me to "let go." My choice was to let go of buying things (+ restaurant meals, travel and other luxuries), the furniture to store the things, the large apartment to hold the furniture, etc. Then I could live on much less, afford to work less, and have the time to discover what "letting go" meant.

It helped that I'd spent much of life in grad school living on $10,000 a year or less. I was most scared of the health-care risk (as a student I had health care). I mentioned this to a Puerto Rican colleague who'd grown up urban working-poor.

She scolded me, "You'll just have to go to the emergency room like the rest of the poor people." Of course that was before huge-profit HMOs took over our health "industry."

Once on a grey, November day I wait in a restaurant for some other faculty to get out of a meeting. Freezing rain poured down the large windows. I thought, "The worst case scenario if I quit my job would be to be out there in that rain with no way in."

The freedom promised by the vision seemed worth that risk. So I abandoned financial security, health-care and professional status for a journey to I didn't-know-where.

I've never come close to that worst case.

Even on a professor's salary in Chicago, I managed to save a fair bit as buying stuff is just not my demon. I had enough for a year at a reduced lifestyle. Then I lucked into an amazing, half time research position that gave me $20,000 for 20 hours a week of work. Then I went into the monastery.

Now I live on credit card debt and the generosity of family. But my first "book-length work for adults" is being marketed by a very good literary agent, so I expect no great financial strain... As long as I continue to own little and therefore need little.