Begin Again

When terrorists crashed four hijacked airplanes on the morning of September 11, 2001, we all knew something profound had happened. Watching the second tower crash live on television, I had simultaneous macro- and micro-reactions. I remember thinking at that moment that the world would never be the same during the rest of my lifetime, and that my career was probably over as well.

It was a defining moment both nationally and personally. Our nation has been living with the consequences ever since, so I leave that discussion to other, more appropriate forums. In my own life, the event forced me to let go of my profession and to cross over into another stage. The journey has been an inverted arc that began with an immediate and steep decline because of the anguish of letting go of my profession, then years into it, eventually bottoming out and beginning again. After much anxiety and self-redefinition, finally, it’s now on the upswing and I’m finding a new calling. The time since that day has been a slow process, letting go of a self-image that evolved and developed over four decades. What felt agonizingly slow was finding a new one, one that surprisingly brought me full circle back to earlier beginnings.

My transition actually began with two earlier economic events in the 1990s: first a technology bubble burst and then a recession set in. The attacks on 9/11 were the third and culminating blow for me. In economics, a bubble is when the price of an asset—such as stock, real estate, technology, etc.— grows irrationally and unwarrantedly higher until the bubble suddenly bursts and prices collapse. The technology bubble came from over-enthusiasm about the Internet and how it was going to change everything all at once. The boom started in the mid-1990s when everyone was overly optimistic about how quickly this new technology would change all the rules and usher in the future, but people ignored the reality that dotcoms had to have a viable business model and make money.

I was never a big or early user of any technology, but I did have a good, long-sighted view of the implications for business and for the economy. Between 1987 and 2002, I wrote five books about the future and was in demand as a speaker at conferences around the world. The day the planes hit, however, people didn’t want to travel, conferences ground to a quick halt, and invitations stopped coming.

The bubble burst in 1999. Internet-based businesses that held promise but didn’t make money failed spectacularly. Plummeting stock values of 90 percent or more in major companies were commonplace. A recession set in, more and more people started to focus on immediate concerns, and fewer people wanted to hear about the future; they just wanted to get through the present.

Job security became a major goal and the self-employed, like me, were among the first to lose their livelihoods. I had weathered several of these downturns, but this time age and age discrimination, too, I think, were working against me. By the time things came back I was part of business past, not business present. I’d had my turn. Psychologically, it was difficult to let go; it wasn’t my choice, external realities made it so. Besides the political and military repercussions, 9/11 economically slammed my lid shut. Like the Internet stocks, my earnings dropped around 90 percent, and within 18 months I went dramatically from my best year ever to my worst year ever.

On the long and deep downward slide, I had too much unoccupied time and felt very uncomfortable, more shame than guilt. I didn’t blame myself, but I didn’t want others to know about my under-employment. The source of the problem lay outside me, I told myself. In other words, it was not anything I had done, but what economists call “externalities.” On the other hand, behavioral economics tells us that when something goes right we take the credit for it, but when something goes wrong we blame external factors. Either way, I knew that I’d lost my appetite to regain a seat at the same table.

I joined a support group of other self-employed colleagues in the same predicament. We met for a morning every six weeks or so for about four years, and that helped a lot. Many were friends I’d known and worked with for decades. No one wanted to mope, but we did want to share and not go through this alone. I enrolled in lifelong learning institutes at Brandeis and Harvard universities, amused that I was back where I got my undergraduate education and where I was on the faculty for 11 years, respectively. Over the past three years I took a wide variety of courses, between one and four at a time. I was a kid in a candy shop. But make no mistake, as much as I enjoyed the courses, they only covered—but didn’t erase—my gnawing feeling of failure and shame.

Slowly, however, I realized yet again that my core love and drive center on learning. The more I enjoyed being a student, the less motivated I was to climb back on the career track. Nor did I want to teach. I taught for almost three decades and don’t want a formal role and responsibility like that again. I identify with the places though, and I’m engaged through committees, Council, and writing. My learning institute involvement also led to a men’s dinner group that meets monthly and has brought new friendships.

Ironic throwbacks give me surprising little pleasures. I took out a public library card and started using it for the first time in decades; I brought brown bag lunches with me; I got a senior photo-ID card and started using the T (rapid transit). Parking in Harvard Square for the day costs $22, while the T cost me 25 cents each way, now 40 cents. The T makes me think of my father every time I use it since he commuted that way to work his whole life and because he got great pleasure from using the T in Boston during his final years, when he could no longer drive. In consulting and public speaking, I got used to limos and first class travel; now I cram my 6’7”—no, now closer to 6’5”—body into tourist-class seats on the occasional personal plane trip, and I mix with all manner of people on the public buses and trains. Truth be told, I experience this as a major measure of coming down in the world, however spoiled and unwarranted that may seem.

Although my courses are quite academic, a large part of my learning is non-academic; transcending it all is my coming to terms with being an elder. The greatest difficulty I had with taking classes was the age of the participants. The average age at Brandeis is around 70 and at Harvard 76. A third of Harvard’s members are over 80, and some of the most interesting people are in their nineties! My unease about age was all the more acute for me because in my professional world I worked almost entirely with people in their forties and fifties, and they were in their twenties and thirties in the research center where I wrote three books. I had evolved into an honored elder in my field and now I was a young kid on a new block, spending my time with people 40 and 50 years older than I was used to being with. The emotion was familiar from long ago at the start of my career but also bittersweet—it was nice to be appreciated again but I was ambivalent about my new peer group.

Every time I walked into a classroom I’d feel a shock and say to myself, “What am I doing here? Everybody is so old. Why aren’t I out working?” I had read enough to know that this was a common feeling. It would dissipate as each class session got going because I generally enjoyed all my courses. I’d forget my issue with age as I got involved in the discussions. Most of the people are well-educated professionals who share a love of learning, and many enjoy making new acquaintances. But I had an undeniably hard time of it and it took three years to relax into the familiarity of attending classes again. There’s no question that you lose the fine-honed edge you have as a professional; slowly, you learn to be at peace about it. An unexpected but logical consequence of this involvement is that I started adjusting to my issues about leaving work and aging.

The older my colleagues, the more they taught me about how to age. This is part of what the movement means by “peer learning.” My comfort barometer is definitely improving. This lesson, which I’m still absorbing, is greater than the academic knowledge I get. It’s a long apprenticeship but it is happening. Each year I give myself more permission to enjoy it, as well as a little more permission to not feel ashamed.

I often felt that my wife didn’t understand. It was only after many long conversations with her that I realized it was my feeling of shame operating; she wasn’t feeling anything negative. After one argument she said: “I have never disrespected you, I have always marveled at what you accomplished in your life and have always told you this. I have always esteemed you. I think this is about your forced retirement, and somewhere along the way you have disrespected yourself because of it.” Wow, did she have that right.

Even though I was growing more comfortable in my new skin, I was still hiding this transformation from my professional friends and colleagues. I felt that if they knew about this, I’d really be finished—“He’s out to pasture, no need to think about him any more.” Early on, for example, a famous MIT economist, represented by the same agency as I, gave a lecture at a learning institute. I would have loved to hear him but feared that if he saw me, word might get back to the agency and then I would never get another booking. The reality, of course, was that I never got any more bookings from them anyway. It was more about what was going on inside me. At another lecture by a professional colleague I hadn’t seen in a few years, I sat in the back, behind a pillar, for the same reason.

I generally avoid using the word “retired” because it’s politically incorrect and inaccurate. But it’s so embedded in our culture that I thought this was me. The dictionary defines it as “having stopped working, and withdrawn from a busy way of life,” and none of that is me. What is true is that I’ve largely disengaged from the business world that I was very much a part of, and that I no longer earn a large current income. Not earning money is part of it, but the worse part comes from feeling useless, unneeded, and unwanted. It’s startling how ashamed I felt about not working any more. The further removed people are from my previous world, the easier it is to reveal my new busy life.

I attended a celebration honoring Warren Bennis, 81, a longtime friend and the author of 27 books on leadership. David Gergen, director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard, acted as host. There were about one hundred guests from academe, business, and government, and I knew many quite well. Every time one of them asked me what I was writing about now, I said that I was writing essays. Immediately I could detect a mild suspicion that was generally followed by a request along the lines of: “Oh, about what?” And when I said that they were personal stories with universal themes, the suspicion turned to skepticism. This prompted one final probe. When I’d respond, “I’m writing essays about things like a wedding, a funeral, families, body images, and God,” the response was laughably always the same: “Oh, there’s so and so, I must say hello. Please excuse me.”

In a few short sentences that everyone knew how to interpret, I had telegraphed the message and got the verdict: “He’s no longer in the game. Bye-bye.” It wasn’t about age because the guests were in their twenties through their eighties and the reactions were the same. I had violated a code, declared my independence, and signaled my departure from the field. Aware of what had happened and that I chose to allow it, I had an epiphany. For years I had been acting as though I had a stack of chits to cash in. It started with a big stack and when the chits were all gone, well, that was what death would be. This was a pretty negative way to look at things but until that moment, the only one I had.

Then I realized that I started my career in the social sciences and left them for a career in business schools. When that ceased to intrigue me, and the outside world seemed more exciting than academe, I left university life. I had a history of leaving worlds I had plumbed in depth. I discovered new ones and began new careers that brought success. That’s when I threw out the “stack of chits” image and realized I had already begun yet another part of my life. Perhaps not a new career, but certainly the open-ended beginning of a new phase, another cycle of growth and exploration. This may not sound profound, but for me it is giddy with possibility, much more than just shifting perspective from half empty to half full. It is the excitement of a new voyage. The negative arc had hit bottom and was now climbing upward. It had taken me five years.

I’m writing in a new voice that is more personal, more immediate. Earlier, I focused on logical analysis; now I am more content with intimate description. I’m returning to topics with more social relevance. And realizing that I’ve embarked on something new, something that could carry me forward for years, I started another book about teenage immigrants and completed it eleven months later. The students are from all over the world. I give each one a chapter, told in the first person, and constructed from interviews recorded at two high schools, one working-class and one middleclass. The book’s title, I Celebrate Myself, is for the kids and taken from the opening line of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”

I had to learn yet again that we can grow anew each time, but only if we leave behind the lives that no longer work for us. One of my sons and his wife are selling their house and will then use the money to buy another one, in a neighborhood with a better school system. They came to love the house they were in and felt tugs of remorse about giving it up, particularly before they found one to move to. My daughter-in-law told me how she got to be okay about it: she realized they wouldn’t grow if they didn’t trust themselves to set out on new journeys without certainty about where it would lead them. That’s how it goes each time. Beginning again is finding greater excitement in the dimly perceived future than in the past that we still hold on to, though it has left us.

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