Knowledge Workers Wish They Could Just Stop Thinking For a Bit

The work never ends, they say

San Jose, CA – A Gallup survey of 1,000 employees of Silicon Valley firms found that while eight out of ten are satisfied with their work, nearly 30 percent wish that they could just stop thinking about it when they are out of the office.

“My work is challenging, exciting and exactly what I want to do with my life,” said Austin Loeb, a biotech engineer who designs components for wastewater recycling systems. “But I’ll be sitting at the dinner table trying to talk with my wife and kids and I’ll be looking at the lattice work on the cherry pie thinking if there’s a better protein structure for the filtering membrane I’m working on. It’s fucking annoying.”

“American society values work,” said Erich Rasmussen, a sociologist at Duke University. “We work longer hours than most other nations and bringing work home is not unusual. However, it is hard to escape work when most of it is done in your head.”

But according to John McPherson, Intel’s vice president for internal affairs that kind of stress comes with the job. “If our engineers were just stamping widgets or answering phones all day there would be no problem at all,” he said.

It is not surprising that the problem also extends into academia. Adeeb Rahman, a political scientist from Stanford, is on sabbatical this year to write a book on the relationship between globalization and civil society and is essentially being paid to think.

“I had heard stories about how draining a sabbatical year can be, what with the endless journal articles and interminable hours in the library,” said Rahman, who is surviving his first sabbatical. “But I never imagined the mental exhaustion. I’m looking forward to next year when I get my TAs back.”

Rick Adams, a construction worker from San Jose, thinks so-called knowledge workers should not complain too loudly.

“I wish my brain were hurting,” Adams said, pointing to his swollen left hand, on which a co-worker had dropped a stack of two by fours. “Yeah they crank out patents and research papers, but what do they know about workers’ comp?”

Managers of Silicon Valley firms have not noticed a decrease in productivity or performance but said they will take the results of the survey into account in monitoring employee satisfaction.