Single women are scaling back their careers in their 30s -- not because they are bogged down raising families -- but because, well, they just feel like it.
At least that's the claim Sue Shellenbarger made in a recent Wall Street Journal article. According to Shellenbarger, overworked career-focused singles want time to go to the gym, to have long dinners with friends, to be able to do laundry and wash the dishes and still get a good night's sleep.
The article references a recent study on women who were planning on leaving their companies in the next few years. Interestingly, mothers and non-mothers offered the same common reason: Both groups wanted to gain more control over their schedules.
It's not exactly a mind-blowing observation that women with children aren't the only ones who choose to slow pedal their careers during mid-adulthood. Some single people also just want to chill out and have healthy work life balance. You know, be human.
The article falters when it attempts to paint the single life as a difficult, unmanageable existence, where one is forced to live in filth and eat frozen dinners because there's no one around to help share household tasks.
Living alone is actually pretty great, lots of recent research indicates. Singletons go out more and are more likely to spend time with friends and family and do fun things like take an art class. They are also growing in number. Living solo is more common now than at any other time in history. There are many reasons why -- young people are delaying marriage. Many are choosing not to marry at all. More people can afford to live alone.
There are, of course, some people who live alone for the convenience, or because they looked for but couldn't find a partner. But, for the majority of singletons, they are living alone by choice. In other words, they just like it.
What Shellenbarger misses is that many singles aren't scaling back their work life because they can't cope. They're doing it because they've built a great life for themselves; now they want to enjoy it.
Speaking of enjoying the single life...
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Folks we work to live not live to work. Ourselves and especially those around deserve our attention. Do things that reward yourself and others, that bring relief and happiness to yourself and others. This is what life is about.
a lot of people of all genders are backed into a non corporate-career lifestyle because those jobs are harder to get and their option is to except diminished financial expectations and a more slackerish lifetstyle with less demanding and poorer paying jobs.
As the slogan goes, "Equal pay for EQUAL WORK."
The slogan is a lie.
Because as people who ACTUALLY pay attention to what feminists DO, rather than merely say know they use the .77 cents on the dollar apples to oranges comparison of ALL work as their "evidence" of unequal pay for "equal" work...even though it's not even slightly "equal" work.
For one you don't need research to realize that single people with no children have more time to do stuff than those with families. Second a increasing number of single people without children is representative of a declining society because it would not be able to sustain a replacement birth rate. These things are approaching the crisis point in places like Japan, Russia, and Hong Kong. It's going to become a crisis soon in Europe. The fact is we need to make more people to replace the ones that die in the the society we happen to live in. Some other nations have too many and others have too few. The ones with too few will decline and end up devoting a large portion of their economy to caring for a aging population supported by ever fewer workers.
We need to stop sugar coating social failures. Men and women getting together to form families and have children is the point of the society whether you like it or not. Our happiness is just another tool in our evolution to keep us on task, and that task includes reproduction.
I want to ENJOY my life and no false sense of "duty" to the human race is going to encourage me to have kids I don't want. The Duggars have 20 kids - I'd say people like them make up for those few of us who choose to go it single and child-free. And if they don't..maybe we'll go extinct. Not my problem.
Somewhere in my early to mid-30s I realized that I really didn't have all that much interest in scratching and clawing my way up the corporate ladder. I looked at those who were at the top and quickly realized they worked 70-100 hours a week. Jokingly, I declared that I was far too lazy to be that successful, but it's not lazy at all. The truth of the matter is, on my deathbed, whenever that is, I sincerely doubt that I'm going to be lying there wishing I'd spent more time at work, or had gotten some meaningless promotion. No, if I have any regrets at all, it will be that I didn't spend more time with loved ones, having fun, enjoying the world, developing skills and talents, enjoying other people, traveling, being creative... I can think of 1,000 things I'd rather be doing than working. Life is short. I decided not to waste it on 60-hour + workweeks and for what? More money? That wouldn't make me any happier. I basically refuse to work overtime for free (I'm salaried) -- That's MY time, which is much more valuable to me than sitting in some cubicle doing mindless drone work for some megacorp. Totally not worth it. And the Megacorp™ does not deserve the very best of me.
I was already in that mindset, and then a cancer diagnosis came along, and that REALLY turned my work views upside down. I am out of active treatment but really having difficulty coming to terms with returning to my old work life, which even at the "lower" levels , was still pretty stressful and soul-sucking. I miss many of my coworkers, but I do not miss the work at all. I am under a lot of pressure to return to work, but am trying to be extremely clear of the circumstances and I am not willing to compromise my health for a job.
Because feminism is about "equality"
Yes - feminism is about EQUALITY. That includes equal pay for equal work - it *doesn't* include more pay for less work - even though men have been getting away with THAT from the dawn of civilization.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-philip-zimbardo/post_3387_b_1543693.html