It is so hard to find time with friends and loved ones. My friends and I have all had to move fairly large distances for school or jobs. After undergrad I moved across the country for grad school, where I pretty much only was able to go home once a year for six years. I lost touch with all of my high school and most of my college friends during this time. I recently moved again for my postdoc and while I am closer to old friends everyone is married and has young kids, so we have to make plans months in advance to meet up. The six year gap is a major issue since being close in college doesn’t make up for how much everyone’s lives have changed since.
While I am only “at work” 50 hours a week I am a bench scientist and I have to stop by the lab pretty much every day to keep my experiments running and my projects moving along. Additionally I frequently get emails from students and my mentor at all hours of the day, not to mention all of the grant/ manuscript writing, reading journal articles, preparing and practicing lectures, department and professional society events, etc. it’s so easy to get sucked up into the work and have months go by. My coworkers are great but they are all just as busy with their own lives and families. Plus in another year I’ll most likely be moving to a new part of the country, so investing time in making friends here doesn’t seem worth it.
The issue with hourly workers not having set schedules really struck me. My brothers a bar tender and we have completely opposite schedules, we only play phone tag these days and send texts here and there. My Dad “retired” a few years ago and got a part time job at Lowe’s and he never knows his schedule more than 10-14 days at a time and the managers always schedule him for weekends he requests off. We’ve been trying to get a weekend to visit for months now but every time he puts in to have the time off they schedule him anyways.
This became a long post, this article really struck a chord with me and I’m realizing that I’m feeling more and more isolated and need to make some changes in my life. I love my wife and luckily she’s been with me for all the moves and craziness or I don’t know what I’d do.