Young Unhappy Professionals–the new Yuppies. Sick of selling out but too high-powered to drop out, some have found a better solution: selling in. Half of all American workers would choose a different line of work if they had it to do all over again, according to a September Wall Street Journal/ABC News poll. And some Americans are actually doing it. Unlike a generation ago, when hippies chafed under the thumb of ““the man,’’ the new sell-ins are following their bliss without joining an ashram. They’re exiting the rat marathon to do something more constructive than living off an organic pig farm in Iowa. And they don’t necessarily believe that money and happiness are mutually exclusive. They’d simply rather put their mental and fiscal resources to happier use.
““At first, people thought we were crazy,’’ says Porter Gale, 31, who last spring quit her high-ranking account-director job at the hip Manhattan ad agency Kirschenbaum Bond & Partners. She and fellow account director Donna Murphy biked from Seattle to New York,filming a documentary on young breast-cancer survivors. The typical reaction from their co-workers was "” “You’re giving up your career! How are you going to pay your bills?’ ’’ Gale says. ““But it was clear to us that nothing was more fulfilling than working on something that we care about.’’ They raised $300,000 and produced a film. And their 2 Chicks Foundation has already given $100,000 to breast-cancer-awareness programs.
Spending more time on the ““important’’ things in life is the mantra of a whole genre of recent selling-in bibles: ““Getting a Life,’’ ““The Artist’s Way,’’ ““The Republic of Tea’’ (by the tea-obsessed founders of Banana Republic) and ““Zen and the Art of Making a Living.’’ A rising division of the personal-growth industry, these how-to manuals cover everything from New Age ““zentrepreneurism’’ to advice on leveraging your utopia with a 401(k). In Elizabeth Pearle McKenna’s controversial attack on success culture, ““When Work Doesn’t Work Anymore,’’ she tells women that life can be as rich at home with the kids as in a corner office. ““They’re putting 20 years into their careers and discovering they don’t have families,’’ says the former publisher of Prentice-Hall, who left her job to raise a family and write books about leaving your job to raise a family. ““And they’re starting to say, “Is this all there is?’ People want meaning.’’ And a legacy. ““Baby boomers are starting to think about what they’re going to leave behind,’’ she says. ““And I guarantee you that nobody wants to leave behind a BMW and a Rolex.’’ News flash to aging boomers haunted by the skinny guy in black holding a scythe: whoever dies with the most toys doesn’t win.
Terminal burnout: Last month’s Wall Street slippage aside, a hot economy has produced the extra income that makes selling in an option. ““They’ve had high-paying jobs the last decade and are in a position to follow their heart,’’ says Seymour Spilerman, a Columbia University sociologist specializing in work and careers. Or, as Bill Haber says, ““When you can afford it, you get reflective.’’ After 30 years as a Hollywood player, Haber had risen to become one of the ruling troika at the Creative Artists Agency. When CAA’s principals split up in 1995, Michael Ovitz left to become president of Disney, Ron Meyer went to run Universal Studios–and Haber went to Save the Children, supervising 4,000 employees in 41 countries. Though he still keeps a hand in show biz–putting up $1 million for Broadway’s ““The Scarlet Pimpernel’’ and serving on the board of Jim Henson Productions–his full-time job is finding ways to feed starving kids. ““Shirley MacLaine aside,’’ Haber says, ““you only live once. And I wanted to get back to working with children.’’ He says nobody in Hollywood, where terminal burnout is rampant, thought he was crazy to abandon the intensely for-profit world of movies and TV for a nonprofit outfit. ““Rather than saying, “Have you lost your mind?’ people were saying, “I wish I could do that’.''
Of course, you have to be wearing a nice pair of golden handcuffs before you can unshackle yourself from them. Only the top 15 percent of the population has cashed in directly from the stock market’s seven-year bull run. It’s unlikely that sculptor Miles Slater would have been able to fully indulge his passion had he not been CEO of Salomon Brothers International in the 1980s. When news of the Oklahoma City bombing broke, he went to write a check to the victims’ families and then remembered, ““I’m not a check writer anymore.’’ Out of a three-foot cube of white Italian marble, he sculpted a figure inspired by the famous photo of a fireman carrying an infant from the wreckage. In April the Oklahoma governor’s office installed his sculpture in the state capitol, and the child’s mother thanked him personally. ““When something like that happens, what can you do other than cry?’’ Slater asks. ““This was so far removed from John Gutfreund, I almost saw my life with two separate sides of my brain in that moment.’’ Gutfreund, you may recall, resigned as CEO of Salomon Brothers after an embarrassing Treasury-note scandal in 1991.
Grandfather Test: But it’s not just corporate capos who can afford to sell in. The tight labor force–at 4.7 percent, unemployment hasn’t been lower in 24 years–has made good employees at all levels a prized commodity. They can jump from job to better offer with impunity. They can demand flex time, as Neil Teplica, 36, a real-estate consultant, did last year, using his off hours to explore remote quadrants of the globe and start an offbeat travel-oriented Web site called What’s Going On? He and his flex-timing partner, David Freeman, just inked a deal with America Online. Teplica’s dream was to explore the world–and to pass what he calls the Grandfather Test: ““I wanted to be proud of what I tell my grandson when he asks what I did for a living.''
Selling in isn’t so much downshifting or downsizing yourself as changing gears to give your soul, or conscience, a smoother ride. You could call Karriem Ali a pre-emptive sell-in. A handsome, dreadlocked African-American, Ali went to Harvard as an undergrad, then to Stanford Medical School. Five years ago, 32 years old and just seven months shy of completing his residency and sliding into a $200,000 salary, he punted. Why? The shortcomings of Western medicine seemed to outweigh its rewards. ““Medicine as it was being practiced wasn’t doing for people what I wanted it to do,’’ he says, adding, ““I didn’t want to work for an HMO.’’ Now 37 and living with his wife, Mouna, in the woods of Washington state, Ali makes about $20,000 a year as a shamanic healer. The turning point came between Ali’s internship and residency, during a four-and-a-half-month trip to check out medical practices around the world. It took him a month to get over ““beeper anxiety,’’ he says, before it dawned on him that this ““was the first time I’d ever been free in my adult life to make my own decisions.''
Escaping white-collar slavery can mean putting years of loot from a high-paying job to new use. Or it can mean adjusting to a more materially modest way of life. (See the so-called voluntary-simplicity movement of the early ’90s.) Take Victoria Kindred, 27, and her husband, Sandy Keziah, 34. In 1994 they found their Madison Avenue ad jobs wanting and began a ritual of reading the atlas and fantasizing about other places, alternate lives. Thinking money could ease her pain, Kindred asked her boss for nearly a 100 percent raise. To her amazement, she got it. ““When I came home, I set out the road atlas and laid a rose on it,’’ Kindred says. ““When Sandy came home, I said, “Guess what?’ ’’ Seven weeks later they were driving to Boulder, Colo., where they set up a marketing-consulting firm with offices at the foot of the Rockies and accounts ranging from Bell South to IBM. ““We let lifestyle take precedence over resume,’’ she says. ““In the end, it’s been more profitable and productive than if we stayed in New York.''
It’s no accident that ad people are among the biggest proponents of this trend toward conscientious career-objection. And, being ad people, they can’t wait to sell selling in to everyone else. Lisa Kivirist wrote ““Kiss Off Corporate America: A Young Professional’s Guide to Independence,’’ due out in February, after leaving Chicago ad giant Leo Burnett. After just two years, she was already suffering the malaise of ““cubicle world.’’ Kivirist and her husband, Ivanko, moved to Browntown, Wis., and opened Inn Serendipity, a bed and breakfast on a five-acre farm that ““reflects our philosophy that work and play should blend.’’ The Inn is designed to ““stimulate and encourage creative behavior,’’ with themed ““writing’’ and ““music’’ rooms. They declared a combined income of about $35,000 on their 1996 tax return. ““Technically, we lost half our income,’’ says Kivirist. ““But you have to balance that with quality-of-life improvement.’’ Still, sacrifices must be made, she says. Like the ““commitment to not having cable and not wanting cable. It’s easy to talk about but difficult to do.''
You can say that again. Sure, it’s all very well to sit in the music-themed room of a solar-heated B&B on a compost farm in the middle of nowhere and contemplate the deeper meaning of life. But Kivirist may be taking her granolahead philosophy too far. Persuading Americans that they should sell in is one thing. Getting them to sell their TV is another thing altogether.
