If you are still a worker, read Overworked America: The Great Speedup.

This will keep up as long as we buy into three fallacies: One, that to feel crushed by debilitating workloads is a personal failing. Two, that it’s just your company or industry struggling—when in fact what’s happening to hotel maids and sales clerks is also happening to project managers, engineers, and doctors. Three, that there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

Since I retired, I have always said that I got out just in time.  The American workplace was a rapidly declining environment.

Now I know why I had trouble getting along in my last two jobs.  (Besides my usual inability to get along with authority figures that is.)

My problem was I was too close to retirement and had enough economic security that I refused to give in.  I told my next to last boss, point blank, “Sure I could hire someone out of my own pocket to do the extra work you are asking me, but I refuse to do it.”

In a performance review with my last boss, I told him, “Yes, I am not as productive as I would like to be.  If at any time you feel I am not doing enough work to justify my salary, just tell me.  I will quietly retire.”

The pending bursting of the real estate bubble is what finally got me to sell my house in Oregon, retire, and move back to Massachusetts.  As I said, just in time.  Although, having a stock market crash just after retirement is not the best of timing.  But at least I was out of the real-estate market for good, I had bought the last house I ever intend to own.