Today’s Post by Joe Farace
Hard work never killed anybody.”— advice often offered by one’s parents
My own parents never gave me that one particular piece of advice, probably because they knew better. After he returned home from fighting in WW2, my Dad worked in a steel mill, specifically an open hearth furnace. at the Bethlehem Steel plant in Baltimore—the largest tidewater steel mill in the USA, at that time. It was a hell-like inferno that. most days, brought him home covered in burns but during all this the bosses thought he was expected to keep on working. One day, a small explosive charge that’s supposed to open a furnace and allow molten steel to pour into a huge bucket, failed to go off. As Second Helper he was sent to investigate, as he got near the charge it exploded, leaving him partially deaf in one ear but glad to be alive. Later he was forced into early retirement because of emphysema. No, he didn’t smoke; he just breathed the air in his workplace.
Most photographers don’t face those kinds of hazards in their working environments but they do face another one that can easily wreck havoc upon them and their loved ones. I’m talking about that “hard work,” that, not counting heart attacks, can not only kill you but will hurt the ones you love. I have heard far to many stories of studio owners who worked every day to get their struggling business to survive, only to miss their children’s lives growing up. Believe me, once you’ve lost their childhood, it’s gone and I suspect that may one of the reasons some older man re-marry younger woman is so that they hope to recapture the time they lost with their first family.
I’m not Anne Landers but there are signs you can watch out for to see if you’re becoming a workaholic. These came to my attention from the Colorado Statue University Cooperative Extension and I’d like to share some of them with you along with some of my own thoughts.
- Do you think that it’s OK to work long hours if you love what you’re doing? If so, you may be a workaholic. A corollary to this is telling yourself that you’re “doing this for the family.” This may really mean lying to yourself, because if after all the hard work is done and you’ve lost your family, what was the point of working in the first place.
- You may experience headaches, insomnia, shortness of breath, racing heartbeat, muscle tension or ulcers. There’s another cliché that says “life’s too short,” and if these symptoms aren’t enough to convince you that you need to make some changes, maybe this next story will.
- You can’t wait to get off the phone with friends when they call. I find this particular symptom poignant, because of an incident that happened to me when Mary and I owned our studio. During a particularly busy time my friend Ernie called while I was out of the office. When I got back Mary gave me his message but I told her I didn’t want to call him back, because I was too busy. She urged me to call, because he was concerned about how I was feeling. So I called him and we had a friendly chat about how I was feeling and what projects each of us were both working on. When I got off the phone, I thanked Mary for urging me to call. When I got home that night, the phone rang. It was Ernie’s wife who called to say he had died from a massive heart attack two hours after we spoke. He was worried about how I was feeling and I almost didn’t take the time to talk with him that one last time. Don’t miss the time to talk to the people you care about and who care about you
PS: Just a reminder: Podcast #3 is live now on my YouTube channel, Joe Farace’s Videos, featuring a look at the Leica Z2X and my experiences shooting 22-year old Agfa color film in a 40-year old Canon SLR, plus some information on where I get my ideas for blog posts!