I’m pretty sure there are five phases to a working life. I say pretty sure because I’ve actually only unlocked four stages, and I know a growing number of people who are in the fifth, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a secret stage I don’t know about. After all, I didn’t know about the first four stages until I ran smack into them. If other “secret stages” exist though, they must be pretty short because I’m fifty and simply don’t have that much time for surprise life stages left. So,without further ado, here are the five that I’m sure about.
The first stage of a working life involves no one asking you to do anything. I call this Phase One: Feed Me. We all start here. At the very beginning, we simply cry for service and it’s delivered. There’s no reciprocity expected. As we go through childhood, we stay in stage one. At first no one asks us to do anything because we lack fine motor skills and potty training, and then because we are incredibly unreliable.
As we move into our teenage and college years, many of us stay in stage one because we remain unreliable, are focused entirely on ourselves, or both. Let me pause and say I don’t mean this as an insult. As someone who was once a teenager and who is now parenting teenages, I think this life stage is kind of delightful… and also these people are unreliable and focused on themselves.
The second stage usually arrives as we enter actual adulthood (and not college, which is a pseudo-adulthood that involves incredible freedom with almost no responsibilities. That’s not adulthood. It’s fantasy camp with kegs). This is Phase Two: Just Work Harder and its mantra is “just get it done.”
In this stage, we do a lot of juggling, making things work, and sucking it up. Putting our head down and grinding is, after all, pretty intuitive so most of us put this tool in our tool belt pretty early in the game. Imagine a day where you have to work at the clinic, get two kids to after-school events, feed them (and yourself) dinner, and make sure homework gets done before bedtime. In stage two, the solution to this challenge is: JUST GO!!
Because we are young, and because life commitments seem to slowly accumulate when we’re starting our adult lives, stage two actually works for a while. In fact, I know some people in their forties who still live squarely in stage two. I don’t know how they do it, but they do.
Most of us, however, get pretty uncomfortable in stage two after a few short years. We’ve realized that we are super busy, not slowing down, and simply can’t keep this pace up for the rest of our natural lives. Also we tend to develop a sense of existential dread. We have thoughts like: “I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing,” “I don’t know what I’ve forgotten but I know it was important,” and “Wasn’t there a kid I was supposed to pick up somewhere today?”
The path out of this dreadful headspace is what I call Phase Three: I’m Writing This Down. This is when we discover calendars, to-do lists and, if we’re lucky, administrative assistants. (As an aside, I’m including to-do lists here but know that I think people who use to-do lists but not calendars are people who are stuck between phase two and three. It’s like they tried to board the flight to a more organized life and got stuck in TSA screening. Yeah, they’ve checked a bag but.. I’m not sure they’re making this flight.)
From what I’ve seen, phase three of a working life is all about the talisman. For some, it’s an app; for others, a leatherbound professional scheduler that smells faintly of cleaning spray, one of those electronic skylight calendars that dominates the kitchen counter, or a motivational day planner emblazoned with something aggressively motivational like “Carpe F&%king Diem” on the cover. Regardless of how it looks, this is the talisman of the phase three people.
Once we get into the calendar phase, the world opens up. We realize that we actually have a lot more day than we thought we did (as long as we know what we’re supposed to be doing and actually do it). Some people stop in phase three and just live here until they keel over at work after a couple decades of well-scheduled productivity. It’s not a path to aspire to, but it happens.
Other people enjoy the calendar phase for a while until they discover the truth that “big calendar“ doesn’t want you to know. Here it is: just because everything fits on the calendar, that does not mean it actually fits in your life. At some point, all the boxes work, but the actual living of life does not. It turns out we cannot teleport from one event to another. We get mentally tired, and putting something on the calendar is not the same as showing up prepared for it and ready to go.
The discovery that perfect scheduling still does not save us from uncertainty, emergencies, or grown-ass people who are living in phase one is what ultimately pushes us out of the calendar phase. This is why, somewhere around our mid-to-late forties, we realize that the calendar cannot be our boss and we move to Phase Four: Saying No.
This is the one I’m currently wrestling with. Saying No (also called the Self Respect Phase) is where we know how to organize and get things done and we also know that agreeing to everything we’re asked to do has a huge cost to us. We understand that if we just take things based on whether they fit onto the calendar, we’re going to be unhappy. We also realize that saying “no” feels uncomfortable and it conflicts with our lifelong self-image as dependable helpers who prove our value by always saying “yes.”
This conflict, the need to say both no and yes, is the defining challenge of phase four. If this conflict is where you’re living right now then… Welcome! I took the top bunk and promise to keep my side of the room clean until one of us moves out.
From what I can tell, the key to phase four is two-fold. First, we have to know what is truly important to us. This means having our priorities figured all the way out. Second, we have to understand that the cost of saying yes, while not visible the moment we say it, is at least as big as the cost of saying no.
If we know our priorities, and we have internalized the downsides of saying “yes” to things that don’t line up with those priorities, then I think we can pretty comfortably hang out in phase four for a while (although I haven’t actually arrived here, so this is where my map gets blurry). If we’re lucky, we get to sit in this phase until we are able and choose to enter Phase Five: No Thank You.
Phase Five: No Thank You is my dream. It’s where I’m trying to get to. No thank you is when you have what you need and your priorities are dominated by the things you truly, deeply want to do. In phase five, you still get asked to do things, but because you have retired and/or are wearing a fishing vest and new balance sneakers in the middle of the day, no one actually expects you to say yes. At this point, you’ve hopefully mastered phase four so if someone asks you to do something you don’t like, you are comfortable saying “No thank you.” Everyone wants to be in phase five. Phase five is going to be the best.
And that’s how I’ve come to believe a work life goes. Advancement to the next phase is not guaranteed, and some people spend WAY longer in certain phases than others do. I should mention that, no matter what phase you get to, there’s a morbid chance that at the very end you’ll go back to Phase One: Feed Me. If this happens, no one asks you for anything because you’re seen, once again, as unreliable (or lacking fine motor skills and/or potty training). It’s best not to dwell on this possibility too much, but the fact that a work life is a circle rather than a ladder seems to fit with everything else I’m learning about life.
