I remember talking to a patient who worked on the line at Caterpillar. He was talking about how proud he was of one of their new earthmovers. The company cafeteria was in the midst of the assembly plant. Rather than pictures of their own machines, they had actual earthmovers, tractors and bulldozers from their competitors. All employees were encouraged to examine the competitor’s machines and compare them to the ones made in the plant. My patient had a real pride of ownership over the machine he worked on and the contribution he made to it. Freud’s famous quote about work and love keeps coming back, but what is rolling around in my head right now is the meaning of life.
Sometimes people think they have to accomplish great and wonderful things to have a meaningful life. When that doesn’t happen their whole lives begin to feel empty. I remember seeing attorneys, physicians, CEOs of large companies who thought their lives were meaningless. One very successful businessman broke down in tears in my office not because of business failures, illness or family problems. He was going bald and couldn’t handle going on in life without a full head of hair. He had developed all sorts of catastrophic expectations as to what would happen. He thought his business would collapse, his friends would shun him and his wife would leave. He had great difficulty putting his life in perspective.
I remember another woman who was in a terribly abusive marriage. She had left her husband once and then returned because their children were young and she didn’t think she could support them. She would, of course, have very bad days re this decision. Yet she would have really good days too because she loved to cook and to bake. She brought in a number of Blue Ribbons that her cakes had won at county fairs. She told me that even her husband was proud of her for that. Another couple I saw was childless but raised mastiffs. The wife would talk about these huge dogs and describe them as her “family”. Both she and her husband had serious physical and financial problems, but as long as they had their dogs they were happy.
What gives meaning for one person may be meaningless to another. It can be foolish to compare your life to another person because you have no real idea what that life is like. Once in the hospital I saw a couple about the wife’s serious illness. She and her husband had been married over thirty years and had raised six children. They had a good marriage despite the fact that the husband worked 12-hour shifts in a factory and she worked similar hours on opposite shifts in another factory. They would see each other briefly in the morning as the children were getting ready for school. The central focus of their lives was their marriage and their children. Someone looking in from the outside would find it hard to say they were happy because of the intense business of their lives, but they were.
Germany has one of the shortest work weeks in Europe. All workers get an automatic four week vacation every year. Pay is uniformly very high and unemployment is low. The Wall Street Journal had a recent article about the fact that despite the positives, many workers there are suffering from “Das Burnout”. Their expectations of their lives don’t match the reality. Sometimes there is a fantasy that there are people who never have bad days. Their lives are filled with one exciting episode after another. This is obviously not true. We all live thru a range of emotions from ecstasy to utter boredom. Some days are wonderful and some experiences are beyond compare. Then there are the other ones we would all like to forget or at least to ignore. It’s important to keep believing that a bad day or a bad week month or even year doesn’t mean a bad life. I don’t believe Thoreau’s quote : “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them” is true. Sometimes the song is hard to find but it is there for everyone. You just have to keep practicing singing until you find it.