Every week in some form or another, I am told by a column reader and/or Kossack that I am living the good life of a star on MTV's Cribs. Specifically, I am told I get paid hundreds of thousands - or perhaps even millions - of dollars a year to produce my 625-word column once a week. Now, it's true - that sure would be the good life, and there are indeed many charmed elites in the luxury apartments of Washington and New York City and who live that good life (while somehow telling themselves they aren't "in the winner's circle" in American life). Unfortunately (at least from a financial - rather than geographic - perspective), I am not one of them.
Right now, I have five different ongoing jobs* plus additional freelance work (such as guest hosting drive-time radio here in Denver for a month) plus the free stuff I do (TV/radio appearances, speeches) in order to keep myself media employable. None of these jobs/opportunities provides a solid middle-class income. Of course, I am very thankful for all of these jobs/opportunities, especially in this economy. And it is definitely true that when you combine all the jobs' income and subtract my family's educational debt, I make a solid middle-class living (by the empirical, data-driven definition). In that way, I've developed a weird, if less dire, version of the "two-income trap" that my friend Elizabeth Warren described in her famous book about what people do to survive tough economic times - only I'm in a five- or six-income trap.
The problem is the "trap" part - specifically, how I'm starting to feel that in order to make this living, I can't do any one job as well as I would like, even when I'm putting in 80-100 hours a week. This is particularly upsetting to someone with my perfectionist, borderline OCD psychology. I feel like I am always making deals with myself - I'll make my column as perfect as possible one week, and drag-ass on a few blog posts. The next week, I'll kickass on the blog, but publish a bad column. Every now and then, I'll find the afterburner strength to pound out another 10 hours of work in the week (like I did last week when I stayed up all night writing my latest In These Times piece and then went straight to do a 4-hour radio show), but that pushes the work week up to 110 hours, and that will inevitably come out of time with my family, or out of my usual 4 and a half hours of sleep.
This is not satisfying nor sustainable, and I'm not precisely sure what to do about it just yet because all of the potential choices suck in some way.
I could drop some work, but that's both financially difficult and frightening to do in a recession like this, because it feels like a huge roll of the dice - I could end up dropping a few things, and then seeing the stuff I held onto vanish because the economy is in the tank.
I could move to D.C. or New York so as to break into the incestuously closed-circuit, geographically-centric social/professional circles that make it far easier to secure high-profile free media opportunities (TV/radio) that then create other paying opportunities, but, then, I'd have to live in D.C. and New York and that would be horrifically expensive and put me into a social/cultural/professional bubble that might destroy my work/perspective in other ways.
I could keep plowing away, but then I may not only destroy my family life, but also burn out.
I could lessen how hard I work while keeping all these jobs, but run the risk of watching the quality of my work seriously suffer, and this is absolutely unacceptable to me as an OCD perfectionist.
I could try to get over my OCD perfectionism, but that would require lots of money for therapy, which would require more jobs, which would only fuel the original problem of being stretched too thin.
As I said, all of these choices suck, and my bet is lots of other people are dealing with the same kind of impossible choices right now.
On a society-wide scale, that's going to have real consequences - putting society under severe stress and making a society do far more with far less has real downsides, not the least of which is a loss in the quality of what society produces (see my latest column for an examination of that loss of quality in the newspaper business).
I'm not sure what I'm going to do in my own situation - and I hope you will all bear with me as I figure it out (while also maing sure to tell me when you think the quality of my work - as opposed to, say, your ideological agreement with it - is suffering). Believe me, I cannot stand the feeling that I may be becoming bad at the writing and activism that I love to do.
I also hope that if you are struggling with similar issues and you read this post, you realize that the reason I wrote this post is not to expound on self-absorption (though there is inherently some of that, of course), vent self-pity or troll for compliments, but to let interested readers know that you are not alone and that there are many people out there struggling with these life/economic choices that have gotten all the harder in this recession (and again, I say all this being well aware that while I face some choices/challenges I'm lucky because I'm able to make a living at all right now, and a living in which I don't have to risk life and limb**).
At some level I find comfort in that - not because it makes me feel better to know other people are having a tough time (and, indeed, I am lucky to have a job and health care and lots are having a MUCH tougher time), but because I feel like the shared struggle may create some sort of solidarity/understanding that might not have existed in our everyone-for-themselves, greed-is-good culture. Maybe that's just my wishful thinking, but I don't care - if I have to cling to it in order to get through this time, then I'll cling to it.
* Syndicated columnist, OpenLeft blogger, Campaign for America's Future fellow, In These Times editor, author of a third book.
**Note: I have no doubt there will be inevitable comments insisting that despite pains to explicitly note otherwise, this diary represents a perspective that doesn't think others have it far worse off. These commenters will be much like those who insist that I am living large off a 10-hour-a-week column-writing job. To these folks, I'll preemptively say two things - first, there are certainly differences in the sacrifices that different kinds of work demand, but in at least some ways, all work-related struggles are work-related struggles (ie. you have to choose work instead of family time/sleep/recreation, you have to scrap by income-wise, you are always looking for a job/a better job, etc.). Secondly, I say go right ahead and vent if you have it worse - and go right ahead and take out your anger on me and this diary. People need to take out the kind of stress I've discussed here in lots of different ways. And if one of those ways is venting here in this diary - if that makes you feel better - then yes, throw the actual content of this diary to the wind, and just vent. Sometimes we all need to, and if you want to do it at my expense, fire away.