Are you short-staffed? Isn’t everyone? Part of the pandemic fallout has been The Great Resignation. CNAs quitting. Nurses walking away from careers.
Something has changed in how willing people are to stick with frustrating working conditions. I’m sure you’ve tried various means to slow the loss, but you’re still bleeding staff.
Jonathan Rauch published his book, The Happiness Curve, in 2018. Yes, before COVID. But his analysis of then-current research on wellbeing was actually prescient identification of the trends that could suddenly intensify during a pandemic.
He looks at two questions that seem pertinent to our discussion. One deals with data about how middle-aged people rate their satisfaction with life (aka happiness). When plotted on a graph, our satisfaction with life makes a curved line, starting out high in our 20s or 30s, but bottoming out in middle age.
The other trend he discusses deals with the choices people make based on how they experience time. Again, it is related to age. I happen to think that what Rauch identifies as simply midlife dissatisfaction and late-in-life time orientation are probably major players in what is being called The Great Resignation.
Midlife dissatisfaction is a universal phenomenon. Rauch summarized the numbers for countries all around the world. Young adults were optimistic. Those in their 40s or 50s, not so much. People at the bottom of the curve feel a lot of motivation to bail on jobs and relationships. Even in the presence of astounding personal success and affluence, the discontent is still there. In fact, for some, the lack of justification for their own dissatisfaction with life actually makes it worse. Those folks feel guilty for being dissatisfied when their lives are obviously going well.
Then what happens? The Happiness Curve begins to rise again. We leave middle-age angst behind and become seniors. Whoa. Isn’t that supposed to be depressing? Old age, lack of control, health problems, death.
But look around. You work in the industry. Even in the presence of disability and decline, seniors tend to be relatively happy. Most of them have learned how to deal with life with some measure of equanimity or even wisdom.
“Looking at people aged 70 to 103, they find that declining health reduces positive feelings. That stands to reason. But after they adjust for health, thereby gauging the underlying effect of aging per se, they find age is associated with more positivity (and less negativity),” Rauch writes.
Who knew? Higher life satisfaction in later years is also universal.
So, how do seniors relate to time? Rauch quotes Laura Carstensen extensively in her research on time orientation in people of different ages and settings. She found that many seniors tend to have a shortened experience of time-related to their activity preferences. They feel like they don’t have time to make new close friends, or time to expand their horizons, or time to explore their interests in more depth.
That is why they refuse our activity programs even when we try to base them on their past interests or potential new ones. That is why they prefer visits from family or old friends to almost anything. That is why they might still choose to isolate in their rooms even when the quarantine is lifted. It’s not about the number of hours in the day, she explains, but about the number of years left.
What happens when we change people’s perception of time? The researchers asked people to choose between spending 30 minutes with the author of a book they liked, or family/close friend, or a recent acquaintance with whom they had much in common. Seniors tend to choose family or a close friend.
Younger people might choose more randomly. Ask the seniors the same question but based on having 20 more years to live, and the younger people based on having only a short time before moving across country. The trends reverse. The younger people choose family/close friends, and the seniors answer more randomly.
A famous example cited in The Happiness Curve took place in Hong Kong back in 1997 when it was first handed over to Communist China. Realizing the scenario that would probably play out as it has in the last few years, the younger people in Hong Kong were understandably thinking about the end of freedom as they knew it. They developed the short time orientation more common to seniors. They pulled back into themselves, their families and close friends. It took about six months for that focus to wear off and more age-normal preferences to return.
And now we have the pandemic. Based on the news, the suicide rates, the anger in the workplace, etc., the old graphs they had for The Happiness Curve obviously need revisiting. I think the drop in life satisfaction is probably deeper and earlier in onset than it was three years ago. People at the bottom of the curve are even more likely to bail on jobs, relationships and life. And our time orientation has become shortened. We’ve pulled back from jobs, relationships and goals that no longer seem so important. With these factors warped during the COVID years, the Great Resignation gathered steam.
Rauch had a goal in writing his book. He wanted to encourage others struggling with mid-life discouragement to hang in there. He was promoting social structures to help with that.
At your facility, what can you do to help people see hope on the professional horizon and time to get there? I’ve started asking people, “What would you do here if you knew you had a year or two to do it?” I’ve also started encouraging co-workers of a certain age that life might just get better with time, not worse.
Donna Stuart has worked as an activity professional in long-term care for the past 10 years. She previously worked as a high school science teacher and a field linguist/language surveyor.
The opinions expressed in McKnight’s Long-Term Care News guest submissions are the author’s and are not necessarily those of McKnight’s Long-Term Care News or its editors.
