【大西洋月刊 201604】辞职吧，中年人
【中文标题】辞职吧，中年人
【原文标题】Quit Your Job
【登载媒体】大西洋月刊
【原文作者】Barbara Bradley Hagerty
【原文链接】http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/quit-your-job/471501/
或许你是个幸运的家伙。或许你已经40岁、50岁，甚至60岁，工作让你充满幸福感。你全身心地投入，感觉到充实又不失挑战。你的工作与你的天赋和兴趣完美搭配。如果是这样，请不要往下阅读了。
然而，我们中的大多数或许正在经历着中年职业危机，或者至少是中年职业厌倦症。根据盖洛普的一项调查，只有三分之一的婴儿潮（译者注：1946年到1964年出生的美国人）和X一代人（译者注：50年代到60年代出生的美国人）对工作持积极的态度。盖洛普工作环境管理和幸福指数的首席科学家吉姆•哈特说，大约一半的婴儿潮和X一代员工属于第二种类别，也就是盖洛普所谓的“不积极”。用哈特的话来说，他们“按时上班，领固定的工资，恪守本分”。有五分之一的人属于“非常不积极”的类别，哈特将其描述成“一个颇为绝望的状态”。这种状态所造成的损失不仅仅是生产力方面的，盖洛普发现，与积极的员工相比，所有年龄层非常不积极的员工更容易遭受压力和身体的痛苦。他们的皮质醇等级和血压普遍偏高，他们患抑郁症和请病假的几率是普通员工的两倍。
处于所有年龄层的员工或多或少在工作中都感到不快乐，但是中年人尤其不愉快，原因多种多样。哈特说，他们经常抱怨有职业“受困”的感觉，也就是当年轻的同事把工作搞得风生水起的同时，自己无动于衷。尽管中年危机在所有的行业、所有的收入级别人群中都存在，但他指出，受过高等教育的员工比仅受过高中教育的员工不愉快感更强烈。他认为，高等教育或许让人产生了更高的期望，因此对于职业的失望感更甚。
哈特的话让我想到哈佛大学商学院退休教授霍华德•H •史蒂文森讲过的事情，他曾经向我解释为什么那么多成功的专业人士的发展都在中年危机中搁浅。他说：“20年的经验与重复一年的经验20次，是两个不同的概念。人们总是做同样的事情，不会成长，他们需要新的挑战。”
在为一本有关中年期的书收集素材期间，我访问过数十位职业专家、心理学家和精神病学家，还有一些试图从目前了无生趣的职业跳跃到另一个职业发展的人。
这些调查与个人的情况密切相关。我做记者这一行已经有30年，其中20年是在国家公共广播电台（NPR）。刚进入NPR时，我发现新闻广播要付出巨大的情绪和身体代价。最终（对于一个现场直播记者最不幸的遭遇），我罹患声带麻痹症，咽喉肿痛。而转播截稿时间加重了我的病情，健康状况难以为继。
我想要做一些别的事情。但是，我所听到的有关一个人离开现在的职业，寻找其它发展机会的经历，结果都令人望而却步。一位失业的贷款办事员考下了一个“绿色”商业学位，4年之后还没有找到工作。一位建筑业管理人员获得了律师学位证书，还通过了纽约律师资格考试，但未能找到工作，只好变卖自己的首饰。一位报刊出版社的高管转投写作行业，最后却是在为以前的同是卖咖啡。
更复杂的是，我听到了很多有关改变职业的不同建议。有的说，中年沮丧感会随着时间推移而消褪。《大西洋月刊》的读者或许还记得乔纳森•鲁赫在2014年的封面文章中提到了U型幸福曲线——由经济学家安德鲁•J•奥斯瓦尔德和大卫•G•布兰奇弗劳尔所描绘的一种现象。他们提出，即使整合了财富、受教育程度和地点的不同因素，人们总体的幸福感在40岁时达到最低点，在50岁开始反弹。奥斯瓦尔德和其他学者发现，我们对于工作的满足感也同样在中年时有所下降，在50岁到60岁期间迅速上升。
一些研究人员认为，中年危机是由某种断断续续的期望所带来的。根据苏黎世大学经济学家汉尼斯•施万德特的研究，当我们年轻时，总是对未来的幸福给予过高的期望，于是随着生活继续，我们感觉到失望。但是当我们进入60岁时，我们开始降低对未来幸福感的期望，而现实经常会给我们带来惊喜。那时候，我们似乎带上了玫瑰色的眼镜。针对大脑的研究显示，年老的人群倾向于忽略负面信息、强化正面信息。
换句话说，你可以用时间来战胜目前的不适感，而目前工作中的细节是无关紧要的。
但是，尽管你可以忍受自己的中年危机，越来越多的迹象显示，你如果变换一个方向，或许会过得越来越好。你的下一份工作或许与你所想梦想的不同，根据我的应验，成功的事业转型往往没有你所构想的那么富有戏剧性。而且新工作通常都比你期待的更加困难，更加痛苦。但是如果你希望在未来发展得更好，一个新的挑战、新的目标或许正是你所需要的。
最近，哥本哈根的幸福研究所调查了2600名丹麦工人，包括了所有的行业和职位类别，内容是职业满足感的来源。高居榜首的满足感来源是“目标感”，选择它的人的数量是排名第二“一个优秀的经理”的人的一倍。
研究所的负责人梅克•维金说，亚里士多德曾经指出幸福与目标感之间的密切关系。良好的生活——哲学家称其为eudaimonia——并不是一个轻松的生活，而是充满了意义并向一个目标奋斗的过程。“我们需要一个目标感。”维金说。
而且，这种需求在中年期有增长的趋势。发展心理学家艾里克•H•埃里克森观察到，一个人在中年期会从向内投入——也就是营造自己的事业、养家、买房、积累财富和声望——转化为向外投入，即为后世留下遗产。
逐渐发展起来的“第二春运动”就是基于这些理念，相信一个目标可以让人成功度过中年危机。例如，包括Encore.org在内的一些组织让中老年人从事有意义的工作，为社会创造福利。哈佛大学和斯坦福大学都开设了一些课程，帮助有经验的专业人士在新领域中再次起航。
斯坦福大学卓越职业研究所的负责人菲力普•A•皮佐说：“人到中年之后，往往希望能够反馈社会，做一些有意义的事情。”但是这种事情说起来容易做起来难。“人们变得焦虑，开始做一些无关痛痒、意义不大的事情，”——这里出席一个研讨会，那里参加一个志愿者项目——“就是为了让自己忙起来。”
尽管这门课程的学费高达每年6万美元，但他们收到的入学申请远远超过班级所能容纳的规模。皮佐以前是斯坦福大学医学院的主任，他希望这门课程可以逐渐进化，并且“民主化”，因为数百万婴儿潮和X一代人即将从劳动力的生力军变成退休人员。他提出的警告是，无目的的浪荡将会付出严重的代价。
他做这件事情的初衷来源于一些研究的结果，具备目标感是思想和精神强壮的重要标志，在某种程度上，就像教育、财富、基因、运动和社交网络那样重要。与那些认为生活没有意义的人相比，具有强大目标感的人寿命更长，他们患上中风和心脏病的几率更低，不大会受到病毒的感染，也不大会患有糖尿病、恶行肿瘤和神经组织退化的疾病。
一个有目标的生活还可以抵挡每一个成年人心中的梦魇——阿尔茨海默病。拉什大学医学中心的研究人员发现，在脑解剖案例中，三分之一的人脑出现病变，混乱的阿尔茨海默神经结代表记忆的损伤和智力的衰退。能证明一个人是否可以避免这些症状的最好标志是，他们是否强烈感觉到生活中的目标。有目标的人是没有目标的人免收疾病侵害的2.5倍。
这并不是说改变职业道路是一件容易的事。人在30岁以后学习新东西是极为困难的，有研究显示你的认知能力（尤其是大脑处理问题的速度）在30岁以后开始下降。
中年人的大脑会毫不留情地背叛你，它会利用你最突出的优势——经验——来对付你。有一个著名的现象叫做“干涉”，我们所积累的专业知识会拖延你学习的速度。华盛顿大学的一位行为科学家莎丽•A•威利斯说：“你的知识存储，也就是你在遇到问题时需要在大脑里检索的文件夹数量以获取相关信息并且重新分类新的信息，随着年龄的增长而增加。”这或许可以解释为什么从一台PC机换成Mac会让人有杀人的冲动，你的大脑和手指已经记住了原来的命令键，反而成为你掌握新知识的障碍。
但即使学习新的技能，体验新的文化是困难的，但改变职业方向或许是你对自己的认知健康最好的一项投资。保罗•努斯鲍姆是一位神经心理学家、大脑训练公司Fit Brains的创始人。他说，当你掌握了一项技能，无论是搞定公司的资产负债表，还是写一篇四分钟的广播稿，这种技能都会被“过分掌握”。他半开玩笑地说：“做一些新鲜、复杂的事情的确要花一些时间，而且是痛苦的，甚至让你痛哭流涕。”但很快，你会形成新的神经回路，你的大脑会感谢你为此的付出。对老鼠的试验表明，学习一项不熟悉的知识会保护海马状突起的脑细胞，这是大脑中保留记忆的主要部位。但这并不简单。罗格斯大学神经科学系教授翠西•J•绍尔斯说：“这必须是一个艰难的过程，必须要全身心地投入。如果仅仅学习一个简单的事物，不足以拯救这些细胞。你当然可以放任自己度过中年危机，但对你的大脑没有好处。”
人们在考虑做一些改变时，往往会发现自己被一些非常现实的问题所困扰，这是人到中年经常会出现的思想，而这种思想正是他们不满的原因。在哈佛大学医学院和商学院兼职任教的心理学家斯瑞尼•皮雷说，一旦你想到即将离开自己一帆风顺的工作，进入一个完全未知的领域，你首先给自己制造了很多障碍。例如，我的房屋贷款怎么办？皮雷建议直截了当地面对这些问题，比如，我们可以换一所小房子。他的建议主要来源于一些针对如何克服恐惧感的研究结果，毕竟当一个人考虑辞职去做一件有风险的事情时，不会先给自己的大脑做个扫描。话虽如此，但职业专家通常给中年专业人士提出的意见是，跳进一条河流之前，先用脚试试水。比如志愿服务一段时间、参加一些课程，会让改变过程轻松一点。
另外一个成功改变职业方向的关键所在，也是我从很多成功转职的学者和专家那里不止一次听到的建议，就是跨越的幅度不要太大。大部分人都无法接受突然、彻底的改变。如果暂且不论提前通知的因素，与我有接触的专家都建议在目前的组织内部探索新的机会，也就是说深耕你的工作，这也能给你带来巨大的目标感。
以色列的一位心理学家卡洛•斯特林格专门研究中年职业转变，他说：“我们都幻想过彻底改变自己的职业面貌。你知道，媒体喜欢报道转行的事情，比如说律师变成厨师，医生变成农民。但这是非常罕见的例子。”
斯特林格建议选择比较现实的目标。一个中年专业人士已经为自己搭造了一个足够丰富的人生简历，擅长什么、弱点是什么、喜欢什么、讨厌什么，这些内容足够让他来探索下一个职业方向。斯特林格在这里强调了“sosein”的概念，这是一个德语单词，意思是“精华”。你的sosein是你内在的“拒绝改变”的本质。换句话说，你应该在你的内在本质和天资的范围之内选择新的职业方向。
最后，专家们都认为人们探索新职业前景的时机宜早不宜迟，这样他们可以享受几十年有意义的工作。人到中年，你或许依然精力充沛，所以勇敢地去做你想做的事情吧。我与很多在中年期寻找更有意义工作的人交谈过，很少有人后悔自己的尝试，即使他们的勇敢以失败告终，最后不得不做回原来的工作。失败更加坚定了他们对原来工作的信心。我发现，最失望的人是那些从来没有去尝试的人。
至于我自己的职业，当我正在自己的中年期写作一本书的时候，NPR宣布用优厚的条件买断愿意离职的员工。我苦苦思索，但后来意识到我已经听从了那些我以前采访过的专家们的意见。几年前，我尝试写作自己的第一本书，凭借自己的能力和经验，用叙述的方式探索新的简洁。我爱这份工作，我已经决定要做出转变。
于是我放弃了或许是世界上最好的一份工作，开启了自己的新篇章。我的转变或许并不彻底，但毕竟是一个变化。
我依然心怀恐惧，但至少我不再感觉到乏味。
原文：
Perhaps you are one of the lucky ones. Perhaps you have reached your 40s, 50s, or 60s blissfully happy in your job. You are engaged, fulfilled, and challenged. Your work draws on your natural talents and passions. If so, feel free to skip this article.
The rest of us, however, may be experiencing, if not a mid-career crisis, at least mid-career ennui. According to Gallup pollsters, only one-third of Baby Boomers and Gen Xers are engaged by their work. Jim Harter, Gallup’s chief scientist for workplace management and well-being, says about half of Boomer and Gen X employees fall in a second category that Gallup characterizes as “not engaged.” As Harter puts it, “They show up; they get their paycheck and do the minimum required.” And one out of five belongs in the category Gallup calls “actively disengaged,” which Harter describes as “a pretty desperate state.” This situation exacts a toll on more than just productivity: Gallup has found that, compared with engaged employees, actively disengaged workers of all ages are far likelier to report stress and physical pain. They have higher cortisol levels and blood pressure, and they are nearly twice as likely to be diagnosed with depression or to call in sick.
Employees of all generations are unhappy at work, but those in midlife are slightly unhappier, and for different reasons. Harter says they are particularly likely to complain of feeling “locked into” their careers—stuck in neutral as their junior colleagues zip along. Although the mid-career slump cuts across industries and income levels, he notes that college-educated employees report greater unhappiness than do those who stopped at high school. He believes that highly educated people may have higher expectations, and may therefore find career disappointments more bitter.
Harter’s remarks remind me of something Howard H. Stevenson, a Harvard Business School professor emeritus, told me by way of explaining why so many successful professionals run aground on the shoals of midlife ennui. “There’s a difference between 20 years of experience, and one year of experience 20 times,” he said. “People do the same thing and they don’t grow. They don’t face new challenges.”
Over the course of researching a book on midlife, I interviewed and corresponded with dozens of career experts, psychologists and psychiatrists, and people who had attempted to leap from an enervating career to a more satisfying one.
The inquiry had intensely personal implications. I had worked as a journalist for more than 30 years, nearly 20 of them at National Public Radio. Early on at NPR, I found that the demands of broadcast news took an enormous emotional and physical toll. Eventually (and quite inconveniently, for an on-air radio correspondent) I developed vocal-cord paralysis, which caused chronic throat pain. Deadlines amplified the pain. My situation was untenable.
I wanted to try something new. But some of the stories I heard from people who’d left one career for another were terrifying: A loan officer who lost her job and earned a “green” business degree had not found work nearly four years later; a construction executive who got a law degree and passed the New York bar was unemployed and selling off her jewelry; a newspaper executive who pursued a writing career found himself making cappuccinos for former colleagues.
Complicating matters, I heard conflicting advice about whether to make a change. For one thing, there is reason to think that midlife discontent may recede with time. Readers of The Atlantic may recall Jonathan Rauch’s 2014 cover story about the U‑shaped happiness curve, a phenomenon characterized by the economists Andrew J. Oswald and David G. Blanchflower. As they noted, even after controlling for differences in wealth, education, and location, people’s general contentment hits a low point in their 40s before rebounding in their 50s. Oswald and other scholars have found that our job satisfaction suffers a parallel dip in mid-career, only to swoop upward in our 50s and 60s.
Some researchers believe that the midlife slump is driven by a sense of dashed expectations. According to Hannes Schwandt, an economist at the University of Zurich, as young people, we overestimate our future happiness, and so we feel disappointed as life goes on. But as we approach 60, we start underestimating our future happiness, and then are pleasantly surprised by reality. We also seem to don rose-colored glasses later in life: Brain studies suggest that as we age, we disregard negative images and focus on the positive.
In other words, you may be able to outwait your malaise. Indeed, the particulars of your job may be incidental to it.
And yet, even if you could endure your mid-career doldrums, mounting evidence suggests that you would probably be better off adjusting course. Your next job might not be the one you have imagined in your daydreams: Successful career shifts, I learned, tend to be less dramatic than the ones we fantasize about. They also tend to be scarier and more difficult than anticipated. But if you want to thrive in the years ahead, a new challenge, and a new purpose, may be the things your brain needs most.
Recently, Copenhagen’s Happiness Research Institute surveyed 2,600 Danish workers, from every sector and type of job, about the sources of professional contentment. The winner, by a sizable margin, was a sense of purpose, which contributed twice as much to an individual’s job satisfaction as did the runner-up, having a high-quality manager.
Meik Wiking, the institute’s CEO, notes that Aristotle recognized the close connection between happiness and a sense of purpose. The good life—what the philosopher called eudaimonia—is not an easy life, but rather one filled with meaning and striving toward a goal. “We need a sense of purpose,” Wiking says.
This need, moreover, appears to grow at midlife. As the developmental psychologist Erik H. Erikson observed, at some point in middle age a person begins to shift from investing inward—building a career, raising a family, buying a house, accumulating wealth and prestige—to investing outward and creating a legacy.
A growing “encore movement” is predicated on these ideas, and on the belief that purpose can propel a person through mid-career doldrums. Groups like Encore.org, for example, connect middle-aged and older people with work that promotes the social good; Harvard and Stanford have launched programs that help experienced professionals plot the course to their next calling.
“When people get to their mid-career phase, they want to give back and do something meaningful,” says Philip A. Pizzo, the director of Stanford’s program, the Distinguished Careers Institute. This is sometimes easier said than done, however. “People become anxious and just start doing things that are not connected or not meaningful,” he says—joining a committee here, volunteering there—“just to feel like they are contributing.”
Though tuition runs $60,000 a year, the institute has received far more applicants than it can accommodate. Pizzo, who was formerly the dean of Stanford’s medical school, hopes the program will be emulated and “democratized” as millions of Baby Boomers and Gen Xers move through the workforce toward retirement. He warns that the alternative—drifting without purpose—is bound to be costly.
His instinct is supported by a growing body of research indicating that having a sense of purpose is a powerful predictor of mental and physical robustness—by some measures, as powerful as education, wealth, genes, exercise, or social network. Compared with people who feel little purpose in life, those who report a strong sense of purpose are far less likely to die over a given period; they are also far less likely to suffer a stroke or a heart attack, and are less susceptible to viruses and conditions such as diabetes, metastatic cancer, and neurodegenerative disease.
A sense of purpose in life may also stave off the greatest terror of every seasoned adult I know: Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers at Rush University Medical Center have found that a third of people whose brains, upon autopsy, display the plaques and tangles of Alzheimer’s never exhibited memory loss or intellectual impairment. The best predictor of whether someone would escape these symptoms was whether they felt strongly that they had a purpose in life. Those who did were two and a half times as likely to be unafflicted as those who didn’t.
Which is not to say that shifting your career path in midlife is easy. Learning anything new past the age of 30 is an upward climb: Researchers have found that some of your cognitive abilities (in particular, processing speed) begin to decline in your 20s and 30s.
In a cruel act of betrayal, the middle-aged brain even turns its singular advantage—our experience—against us. Through a phenomenon known as interference, the expertise we have accumulated can slow further learning. As Sherry L. Willis, a behavioral scientist at the University of Washington, puts it, “Your store of knowledge—the number of file drawers you have to go through to retrieve and to get the relevant information and refile the information—increases with age.” This explains, for example, why switching from a PC to a Mac makes people homicidal: The fact that your brain and fingers remember the old key-command system makes mastering the new one more of a struggle.
But even if learning new skills or navigating a new corporate culture is tough, shifting your career may be the best investment you can make in your cognitive health. Paul Nussbaum, a neuropsychologist and co-founder of the brain-training company Fit Brains, notes that after you have mastered a skill, be it balancing the company’s books or (in my case) writing a four-minute radio story, that skill becomes “overly learned.” “Doing something novel and complex is going to take some time, it’s going to be painful, you’re going to cry,” he says, only half-joking. Soon, however, you will develop new neural circuits, and your brain will thank you for the effort. Studies of rats have shown that learning an unfamiliar task preserves new brain cells in the hippocampus, an area of the brain key to making and retaining memories. There’s a catch, though. “It has to be difficult,” says Tracey J. Shors, a professor of neuroscience at Rutgers University. “It has to be engaging. If something is really simple to learn, it’s not enough to save those cells from death.” You may be able to get through your chaotic middle years on autopilot, but doing so won’t help your brain.
People considering a change may also find themselves tripped up by the realistic thinking that is so characteristic of midlife—the very thinking that is a source of their dissatisfaction to begin with. Srini Pillay, a psychiatrist who teaches part-time at Harvard’s medical and business schools, says that the moment you consider leaving your flatlining job for a potentially adventurous one, you are likely to erect all sorts of impediments. For example: How are we going to manage the mortgage? Pillay advises addressing these concerns directly: We can move to a smaller house. His suggestions derive mainly from studies on how to overcome phobias, since no one has scanned a person’s brain as she contemplates leaving her job to join a start-up. They nonetheless accord with what career experts almost always recommend to mid-career professionals: Dip your toe in the water before jumping into a new career. Volunteer, take a class, ease into the change.
Another key to a successful transition, one I heard about again and again from scholars and life coaches and people who had successfully changed careers, is making a relatively modest leap. Most people can ill afford to abruptly quit their jobs. If giving notice is out of the question, the experts I spoke with suggest that pivoting inside your organization—that is, tweaking your job—can still bring you a greater sense of purpose.
Research indicates that having a sense of purpose is a powerful predictor of mental and physical robustness.
“We all have fantasies of total transformation,” says Carlo Strenger, a psychoanalyst in Israel who specializes in mid-career change. “You know, those hyper-dramatic changes that the popular press likes a lot, like the lawyer who becomes a chef, and a doctor who turns into an organic farmer. They’re really very rare cases.”
Instead, Strenger advocates more-realistic goals. A mid-career professional has created enough of a biography to know herself—where she excels and where she flails, what she enjoys and what she dreads—and her insights should guide her next phase. Here Strenger emphasizes the concept of sosein, which in German means “essence,” or as he translates it, “thus and no other.” Your sosein is something inborn that is “recalcitrant to change.” In other words, he explains, you should change your career within the boundaries of your innate traits and talents.
Finally, the experts I spoke with urge people to start plotting their next stage sooner rather than later, so as to have time to enjoy a couple of decades of meaningful work. At midlife, you have perhaps one good spin left at the wheel. So go for the thing you really want to do. For two years, I listened to people who sought meaningful work in midlife. Few regretted the attempt, even if they failed and returned to their prior work. Failure just sharpened their appreciation for their previous trade. The people who voiced the most regret, I found, were those who never tried.
As for my own career, while I was in the middle of writing my book on midlife, NPR announced that it would offer generous buyouts to employees who were ready to leave. I agonized. But then I realized I had already followed the advice of the experts I had been interviewing: Several years earlier, I’d tested the waters by taking a leave to write my first book. I had pivoted on my strengths and my experience in using narrative to explore ideas, and I had loved it. I was ready to make the leap.
So I gave up what is arguably one of the best jobs in the world, and started my next chapter. My transition may not sound all that dramatic, but it certainly feels that way.
I am still a little terrified. But one thing I am not is bored.
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