Growing Number of Yuppies Show Preference for Downward Mobility : They Have Opted Out of High-Paying, High-Stress Careers
It was May, 1983, and even though the term yuppie was yet to be coined, Deri Rudulph definitely was one. After attending Sarah Lawrence College and graduating from UC Santa Barbara, Rudulph continued her impressive academic career, earning a master’s degree in Russian at UCLA, then graduating from the UCLA School of Law.
She was hired by one of the city’s most prestigious law firms, Manatt Phelps Rothenberg & Tunney, where she specialized in real estate law. She bought a home in Westwood, ate at all the hottest restaurants and always traveled first class.
So what? she began asking herself.
Long, Dull Document
“I was sitting at my desk one day, reading a long, dull document, and I thought to myself, ‘I don’t want to die a lawyer.’ ” Three months later, Rudulph, now 35, quit her job and began a new life as a free-lance photographer.
Rudulph is among a growing number of the country’s 76 million baby boomers who might be labeled “downwardly mobile,” people who have opted out of high-paying, high-stress careers and chosen life styles richer in creative and spiritual rewards.
The ‘80s generation has been so roundly characterized as materialistic and success driven that it’s often shocking when one of their number bails out of his or her BMW. In fact, it sounds more like a scenario from the ‘60s than the ‘80s, and, according to one psychoanalyst, a connection between the two decades does exist.
Despite cosmetic trappings that might suggest otherwise, today’s young urban professionals “have taken on the legacy of the ‘60s in terms of personal expression and attitude,” said Douglas LaBier, a senior fellow at the Project on Technology, Work and Character in Washington.
LaBier began studying the conflicts of successful career men and women seven years ago. He found an abundance of anxiety, depression and alienation.
“The press has seen only the materialistic, selfish side of yuppies,” he said. “And that’s there. But what I found is that they are also searching for fulfillment. They want the perks of success, but they also want more opportunities to find a sense of meaning in their work. In most places, it’s just not there, so they feel like they’re trading off.”
Two years ago, Lee Klein, 44, of Westchester, put on his three-piece suit to go to his job as a manager for General Telephone. Instead of working, he decided to quit.
“I was on my way up the corporate ladder,” he said, “but I never liked the structure or the politics.”
He admits that “cutting the corporate umbilical cord is a big step” both psychologically and financially. “But if you’re not having fun you should stop . . . unless you believe in reincarnation, this is it.”
These days, Klein dons khaki shorts and a custom T-shirt that reads: “The California Native,” the name of his one-man tour company that shows visitors relatively unknown parts of Los Angeles.
Xooey Xito, 39, is another ex-yuppie. Xito says he traded a two-acre estate in Benedict Canyon and his conventional name, Richard Dumont, for what he calls “the sleaze of Venice” and the life of an artist.
“I always thought that the more I got, the happier I would be,” said the ex-music promoter, manager and real estate investor. “But I was confusing happiness with pleasure. Happiness is learning to live with less.”
Xito, who derived his first name from the title of the J. D. Salinger novel “Franny & Zooey”--”because it sounded like an artist”--said he retained his VW convertible from among his fleet of seven cars, but kept almost none of the friends he had when he was a successful businessman.
“Now I’m looking for creative, nurturing people,” he explained.
“Today, money is not a dirty word,” said Dr. Fawzy Fawzy, an associate professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine who has studied burnout among professionals. “It’s glamorous to be rich, and it’s an attractive philosophy for the young and gullible.”
But money doesn’t buy everything, his patients have found. “With success comes competition that often drives friends away,” Fawzy said.
When success-driven people are hit with a physical illness, he added, they often realize that they have spent a lot of time achieving material things. “When they review what they’ve done with their lives, the only thing they can count is dollars.”
For the burnt-out yuppie who enters therapy to cope with such a crisis, the goal is to achieve some sort of balance in life. Said Fawzy: “You cannot depend totally on work to get you all your gratification.”
But this is easier said than done, he acknowledged. “If you say money is bad and working is bad, well, it is not. It’s the amount of time you spend doing those things that counts.”
Moderation was an unfamiliar word to real estate attorney Deri Rudulph. “Lawyering just isn’t fun unless you’re overworked and under a lot of pressure,” she said. Her intense career left little time for a new love: photography. She was elated when one of the partners in the firm asked her to shoot a photo book of the staff. It was one of the first steps in her evolution from lawyer to photographer.
Reflecting on her six-year career as an attorney, Rudulph has no regrets. “I have this theory that very smart people go into law because it’s a well-trodden route. But there are no risks.” She refers now to the occupation as “the golden handcuffs.”
Rudulph thought she was financially prepared for the nose dive her income would take when she switched careers. “The first thing I did was take in a roommate, another woman lawyer, to help make the mortgage payments. I had enough savings, but I thought it would take a lot less time to start earning money as a photographer.”
Making ends meet was a problem, but the solution was simple: “I don’t buy anything anymore,” she said. “I’m much more parsimonious. But it was either time or money, and I picked time.”
She still admits to sometimes waking up in the middle of the night “in a cold sweat” worrying about money. Her lawyer friends, however, envy her new career, she said. “Most people aren’t willing to take the risk. You can’t wait for someone to push you.”
Video Histories
During the two years since she left the law firm, Rudulph has found her niche making video histories. She is usually hired by the children or grandchildren of the subject to spend the day interviewing that person about his or her life. Then she condenses the material into a two-hour portrait.
“I’ve had people tell me about watching bodies fall out of buildings during the stock-market crash,” she marveled. Another stirring moment was when one subject looked into the camera and told his family how much he loved them--for the first time.
Lawyering now seems rather passionless by comparison, she said. Yet Rudulph recalled with a laugh a remark by one of her peers when she announced she was leaving the profession: “What will you do for stimulation?” he asked.
Xooey Xito believes that his intense preoccupation with success was a means of proving himself to his father, a successful businessman. But in Xito’s relentless struggle to match his father’s driving ambition, he resorted to using drugs and alcohol.
“They helped me push and push in business,” he said. “They cut off my ability to feel.” When he did stop to feel, he realized he was “a round peg in a square hole.”
In 1982, Xito decided “I wasn’t going to be the manager anymore. I’ll be an artist. I had all this passion and creativity bubbling up.”
But the transition took time. After he battled his addictions, Xito spent a year adjusting to a life style imbued with radically different values than the one he had lived before. He counseled other drug addicts and helped distribute food to hungry children in Mexico.
“Spiritually, my old life as a businessman had to die so I could live again,” he said.
Now Xito says he works just as hard. “When I write a poem, I’m exhausted. But the funny thing is that the product isn’t important. It’s the act of having written it that counts.”
Xito, like Rudulph, is exhilarated by the risk he’s taken in leaving something safe to pursue a dream. “I’m willing to look foolish,” he said. “If it turns out that there’s something there, great. If not, let them laugh.”
Lee Klein’s moment of revelation came while climbing Ayres Rock, a monolith in the Australian outback. He knew of places just as awesome in Los Angeles, yet most tourists, he realized, rarely saw more than the amusement parks, Malibu and Beverly Hills. If he could earn his living showing others bandit hideaways in the San Gabriel mountains and spectacular earthquake fault lines--the kinds of places he has explored and cherished as a child--it would be a dream come true.
Getting The California Native off the ground hasn’t been easy. Like Rudulph and Xito, Klein said he is working much harder than he did in his previous career, and for considerably less money.
“I’ll be really happy when I can make my mortgage payment from the business,” he confessed. To supplement his income, Klein teaches seminars at Loyola Marymount College, and management and computer sciences at Chapman and Santa Monica Colleges.
A Different Stress
Klein, who is divorced and has three children who live with him on a part-time basis, says that despite his drop in income, “I consider my standard of living to be much higher. Rather than sitting in an office, I’m up in the mountains hiking. The stress is a different kind,” he said. “You’re betting on yourself. Your success is not up to the whims of other people--whether they like the way you part your hair or who you go drinking with.”
Douglas LaBier considers people like Xito, Rudulph and Klein to be unique. “Most people don’t want to drop out in 1985. Not everyone has the ability to be an entrepreneur,” he said.
Indeed, he noted, more than 50% of the work force is employed by companies with 100 or more employees. If anything, he predicted, “the trend is toward more bureaucratic kinds of jobs.”
The trend is also toward massive job dissatisfaction on the part of employees in the 27- to 47-year-old age group, LaBier said, unless there are some changes in the way large companies think. “Progressive companies are realizing that in order to keep themselves economically viable, they must integrate new technology, flexibility, teamwork and participation of employees,” he said.
Rethinking of Values
But until that happens, LaBier recommends that yuppies recognize that their careers “are not going to be the primary source of fulfillment in life.” He said this requires a rethinking of values.
“A lot of yuppies feel empty inside because they’ve adapted to the values of large organizations, and as a result, they are suffering a spiritual malaise,” LaBier said.
Achieving balance in a lopsided, career-oriented life might require doing a stint of volunteer work, or, for someone else, he said, it might be practicing a different attitude in one’s relationships.
For Rudulph it was abandoning something she had worked very hard to attain. But her law degree has come in handy in her new life. She was recently asked to appear on four upcoming episodes of “Divorce Court,” which only uses real attorneys in the roles of attorneys, playing--what else?--a lawyer.
