Hitting the wall

I was talking to my dad the other night, telling him about the various travails we're going through in my house, and how we all seem to be hitting a pretty hard wall, pretty hard. He said, with obvious frustration, "So many of you young people are going through this. It's not right. I've never seen people your age as stressed out as y'all are."

He made me think about something. Dad, who is retired and in his seventies, was a civil servant, and for some of my youth, a part-time farmer. He got off work between 4:30 and 5 every day. He had time to coach my baseball teams, to play with us in the afternoon during the off season, to work with us on our chores -- basically, to have a life outside the office. Everybody else's dad did too, as I recall. Most of the guys I grew up with, their dads worked shift work at the mill, things like that. People worked hard, but their days were pretty set. The moms either didn't work, or worked regular hours.

That's pretty much gone, as far as I can see. I've never lived that way. I come home from work at 7, 7:30 most every night, in part because I've taken on so much extra work. But I'm not the last one left in the office most nights. Everybody's working really, really hard -- and these days, glad to have a job. I have never had insomnia in my life, but for the past five weeks or so, I've not been able to get to sleep without sleep drugs. I can't say that I'm anxious about any one thing, either -- it's just what's in the air, so to speak. And I know we're not the only ones going through it, my family. Others are too. People we know.

How is it that our generation is better educated than our parents' generation, and wealthier, more or less, but they had so much more time to ... live? I remember having lunch with a friend a couple of years ago, and she was telling me about a pal of hers who works for some corporation as an executive. The friend had brought in a lot of business that year, and had won an incentive trip to the Caribbean with other sales leaders from various divisions. The friend came back startled and even shaken by her encounter with workers in their 20s and 30s. All they could talk about was work. All they wanted to do was work. Their whole lives were built around the office, and career achievement, and working more hours to achieve more success at the office. And my friend's friend, who was in her late 40s, thought these young people were crazy.

But they were the future. Are the future. Are the present. What scared her is knowing that if she wasn't prepared to work herself into the ground like they were, she'd be the first let go in a time of layoffs. I wonder how that woman is feeling right now.

The thing is, I don't spend time with people slavishly devoted to their careers. I spend time with people who have no real choice. Because that's how things are.

I tell you this because my wife was diagnosed this week with a case of shingles. She's 33; shingles usually strikes older people, because their immune systems are weaker. But they can hit young people whose immune systems are compromised; a prime culprit is stress. (A young woman who writes for the Washington Post describes her bout with shingles here.) Shingles is a deceptively homey name for an extremely painful disease. If you had the chicken pox virus as a child, it's dormant in your system, and can attack your nerves as an adult. Shingles is basically chicken pox in adults, but it goes after your nerves within. The pain is debilitatingly intense -- Julie says it's worse than when she was recovering from her C-sections -- and lasts five weeks or longer. One of our neighbors had the stuff last year, and told Julie today that she recently read that more and more young people are coming down with it, because everyone's immune system is so taxed from the stress of the way we live now.

Oh, and when the hideous rash goes away, that's when the fun really begins, says the Post:

After the rash has healed, shingles can get really nasty. Pain can persist or reappear. This is known as postherpetic neuralgia (PHN), or leftover pain. People with PHN -- usually those who are older and sicker -- no longer have the virus multiplying and affecting nerves; instead, they are suffering from damage to their nerve tissue.

PHN can make everyday activities difficult and daily stimuli -- the touch of clothing on skin, the feel of a breeze -- unbearable. It can be debilitating and last for months or years. It can also lead to depression.

PHN is "uncomfortable and disabling," said Phillip Brunell, a special volunteer at the National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). "People can't sleep, some can't work and they're in constant pain. It's a condition that's difficult to manage."

Julie's shingles is not the only physical sign of our family being overstressed, but it's the worst. So I'm trying to figure out what kind of change needs to happen in our family to relieve the pressure. Interestingly, we've had several conversations lately with other families our age who are reaching a similar conclusion. They've gotten to the point where they know something's got to give. The frustrating thing is, it's not like there's something obvious that they (we) could give up (though I am going to cancel speeches and classes for the kids and everything else on our calendar for the next couple of months; I've got to work, but I want my family doing nothing but chilling out). You've got to work like this just to keep up. And there just seems to be something in the culture, you know?

When I was a kid, we were at fish fries or barbecues most every weekend. People had time to socialize, to relax and enjoy being together. I don't know anybody my age who's like that.

Something is wrong.

My dad says in his generation, everybody worked hard, but few people were as stressed out as my generation is. And I think: if my little family is stretched so thin, given that we're on solid economic footing and live a relatively uncomplicated life, what on earth is it like for others?

Where does it all end?

What's it like for you and yours? How do you deal with it?