【英语生活】到哪儿去找幸福？

A couple of months ago a friend asked if I'd write her a job reference. She is bright and witty and sophisticated and for about 20 years has held a succession of powerful jobs in television and newspapers.

Yet this latest position was rather different: she had applied to be a receptionist at a small office building in Mayfair. This struck me as an eccentric career choice for a clever woman on the cusp of 50, but I wrote out the reference and in due course she got the job.

Last week I had lunch with her and asked how it was going. She told me that for the first time in her life she was entirely happy in her job. At last she had found something that had all the good things about office work and none of the bad ones.

Her routine was soothing. The people were friendly. The work was pleasant. It was also finite, easy to do well, and ended on the dot of 6pm. There were no unmanageable work loads, no ugly competition, no gnawing anxiety that you aren't up to it and that someone else is better.

But best of all, she said, the receptionist's job didn't swamp her mind and her life; instead it left plenty of room for her to think her own thoughts. The only thing that wasn't fantastic was the money, but it was enough and she didn't mind.

After our lunch she took me to see the site of such happiness. I eyed her curvy glass desk and saw through the square-paned windows the bare trees of Green Park. I imagined myself smiling at the hedge fund managers who came in and out: "Hello, it's milder today isn't it?" I could see a certain charm in it.

Yet what impressed me most about her satisfaction was how it contrasted with the dissatisfaction of almost all my other contemporaries. One word describes how most of us in our late 40s are coping with far more interesting jobs: badly. In varying measures we are susceptible to boredom, fear, exhaustion and frustration. We've all been working for an eternity as it is, but we now realise we'll have to go on working until we are 70 at least and so there is still a long way to go. In all it is not pretty. We feel we ought to leap, but don't how and don't know which way to go.

A relatively sensible article in February's Harvard Business Review attempts to explain why we are getting it all wrong and why my receptionist friend is getting it right.

The rest of us are falling for the most common misapprehension of mid-career crisis - which is to think this is the beginning of the end. Instead the magazine insists that we have more opportunities than we used to. Because we have worked for a few decades, we know what work is like and what we are good at. The trick isn't to hanker after some magical transformation - one minute you are a banker, and then, hey presto, an organic farmer - but to think carefully and practically about what suits you.

When I think about it now I see that, unlike my friend, I'm not ready to get in touch with my inner receptionist. She says the job gives her space to think, whereas I have a horror of unstructured thought. Indeed one of the things that I've worked out over the past few decades is that I need to be wildly busy all the time: in fallow periods my thoughts wander off in all sorts of unwanted directions.

Still more hearteningly, the HBR reminds us that even though some doors may be closed at 50, in reality there weren't so many open ones at 25. This is a truth that we tend to forget: most people are in a rut from the start, blindly pursuing careers with no idea of what the other options were. When I was in my 20s I didn't feel that I was deciding rationally between hundreds of possibilities, I was simply trying to do what I thought was expected of me, and what my friends were doing. My motivation was to do it better than a tiny handful of people I considered to be my rivals.

Now that I think of it, I have stopped caring about these petty contests. I am doing better than some of my former competitors and worse than others, but either way it doesn't matter any more. This is liberating. I am starting to mind less what other people think of me and that is liberating too.

My friend confirms that she couldn't have become a receptionist in her 20s or 30s. She would have been miserable, unfulfilled and certain she was throwing her life away. At 49 she has nothing more to prove; she has already proved that important jobs are no longer what she wants.

A couple of weeks ago another cheering piece of work was published by scientists at the University of Warwick showing that happiness over a lifetime is U-shaped. It looked at thousands of workers in 80 different countries and found that most people start off happy, and then slide towards misery, reaching a trough at 44. By our early 50s we start to get happy again and by our 60s and 70s happier still.

It isn't altogether clear why we get cheerier as death draws closer. I suspect it is mainly because the burden of ambition and expectation slips away. We no longer hanker after what we are never going to have. I'm not quite there yet and neither are most of my contemporaries. Ambition still rages, and prospects are intolerably uncertain. But if we hold tight, the upward curve of the U will carry us along soon. We don't need career coaching. We just need time.

几个月前，一位朋友问我是否能帮她写封求职推荐信。她聪明、机智、久经世故，在过去约20年中，在电视和报纸界相继做过一些有实权的工作。但最新的这个职位大不相同：她申请在梅菲尔(Mayfair)地区一幢小型办公楼里当一名前台。对于一位50出头、头脑聪明的女性而言，这种奇怪的职业选择令我感到惊讶。但我还是写了推荐信，而她也适时得到了这份工作。

上周，我与她共进午餐，询问她工作情况如何。她告诉我，在她的一生中，这是她第一次觉得自己对工作完全喜欢。她终于找到了一份具备办公室工作所有优点、而没有一点缺点的工作。

她的日常工作让人心情放松。她接触的人很友好。工作令人开心，工作量也有限，容易干好，而且能够下午6点准时下班。这份工作没有应付不过来的工作量，没有丑陋的竞争，没有那种令人苦恼的焦虑：你自己无法胜任这份工作，其他人干得更好。

但她表示，最重要的是，前台的工作没有占据她所有的头脑和生活；相反，给她留下了很大的空间，让她考虑自己的想法。唯一不够完美的一点是薪水，但这些钱够用了，她也不介意。

吃过午饭后，她带我去看这块幸福之地。我看到了她那曲线形的玻璃桌子，透过正方形的玻璃窗看到了格林公园(Green Park)里的光秃秃的树木。我想象着自己对进进出出的对冲基金经理们微笑着说：“嗨，今天天气不错吧？”我能够看到这里有一定的吸引力。

不过，她的满足感给我留下印象最深刻的地方在于，这与几乎所有其他同龄人的不满足形成了非常鲜明的对比。一个词可以形容多数我们这些年近50的人如何应对有趣得多的工作：差。我们都不同程度上容易受到厌倦、恐惧、疲惫和挫折的影响。我们实际上都在无休止地工作，但我们现在意识到，我们将必须至少工作到70岁，因此前面的路还很长。总之，这不是件令人愉快的事。我们觉得自己必须向前跳跃，但不知道如何跳跃，也不知道该选择哪种方式。

2月期《哈佛商业评论》(Harvard Business Review)中一篇相对明智的文章试图解释，为什么我们都理解错了，而我的前台朋友却理解对了。

我们其他这些人陷入了最常见的中年职业危机误解的圈套——即认为这段时期是结束的开始。相反，这篇文章坚称，我们的机会比过去都要多。由于我们工作了几十年，因此我们知道工作是什么样，以及我们自己擅长什么。秘诀不是追求某种神奇的转型——1分钟前你还是一位银行家，之后，突然就变成了一位有机农场主——而是谨慎、实际地考虑什么工作适合你。

当我现在考虑这个问题时，与我的朋友不同，我觉得自己还没有做好与内心的“前台”取得联系的准备。她说这份工作给了她思考的空间，而我则惧怕毫无章法的思考。实际上，过去几十年我得出的结论之一，就是自己必须一直保持在非常忙碌的状态：闲暇时，我的思想会转向各种各样不必要的事情上去。

更令人振奋的是，《哈佛商业评论》的这篇文章提醒了我们：即便50岁的时候一些大门可能向你关闭，但实际上，25岁时也没有那么多大门向你敞开。这是一个我们往往会忘记的真理：多数人从一开始就定了型，他们盲目的追求事业，对于其它选择毫无概念。当我20多岁的时候，我没觉得自己在数百个可能性中做出了理智的选择，我只是在努力做一些我认为人们期望我去做的事，以及我的朋友们也在做的事。我的动机是要比自己心目中为数不多的几个对手做得更好。

既然我考虑到这个问题，我就不再关心这些微不足道的竞争。我目前比一些以往的竞争对手做得更好，同时比其他人差，但不管是哪种情况，都已不再重要。这一点正在起作用。我开始不那么关心其他人对自己的看法，这一点也在起作用。

我的朋友证实，她不可能在20多岁或30多岁时去做前台。那样的话她将感到痛苦、不满足，并确信自己是在浪费生命。49岁时，她没有更多东西要去证明；她已经证明，自己不再想要那些重要的工作。

几周前，英国华威大学(University of Warwick)的科学家发表了另一份令人欣喜的研究报告，报告显示，人一生中的幸福曲线是U型的。论文对80个不同国家的数千名员工进行了调查，并发现多数人起初感到幸福，之后则开始不开心，到44岁时达到谷底。而到了50岁出头，我们重新开始感到幸福，到60多岁和70多岁时会更加幸福。

目前尚不完全清楚，为何我们距离死亡越近越感到幸福。我猜，这主要是由于雄心和预期的压力慢慢减轻。我们不再追逐那些我们永远不会拥有的东西。我还没真到那种程度，我的多数同龄人也没有。雄心仍在澎湃，前景也非常不确定。但如果我们紧紧把握，我们会很快走上U型的上行曲线。我们不需要职业培训。我们需要的只是时间。

译者/何黎