Welcome to Elsewhere

III. As I write this piece at home in my Manhattan loft, I'm also elsewhere—leaning across the desk to help my 10-year-old daughter with her online math assignment, shouting at my 9-year-old son to turn down the volume on his Guitar Hero videogame and texting my wife as she shuttles between meetings. I am eager for her to get home, so we can plan our business-travel schedules and the kids' after-school activities for the spring. Then it will be my turn to go out for a meeting with a co-worker.

Here but also there, living in a blended world of work and leisure, home and office, I'm one of a new breed of American professional in Obamaland: the Elsewhere Class. This group of white-collar workers is fundamentally different from the midcentury image of the "company man" or "the man in the gray flannel suit," that executive of yesteryear who worked much closer to the production of physical goods, even if he didn't actually get his hands dirty himself. He drank and smoked more, although he also puffed less marijuana and popped fewer antidepressants than today's anxious adults. And, most important, he labored fewer hours, leaving his work behind at the office.

Today's professional, by contrast, is constantly dogged by a feeling that he or she should be "elsewhere"—back at the office, at a party full of potential clients, home with the kids or at a social function with the spouse. Always on the go, we feel like we are in the right place at the right time only when in transit, moving from point A to B. Constant motion is a balm to an anxious culture where we are haunted by the feeling that we are frauds, expendable in the workplace because so much of our service work is intangible. While there have always been white-collar workers who provided services—the lawyers, bankers and the Mad Men of advertising—never have so many professionals worked in such abstract industries so far removed from fulfilling basic physical needs. Think management consultants, investment analysts and publicity agents. What's more, the ubiquity of information in today's "knowledge economy" makes each occupation's claim to unique expertise flimsier and flimsier. We all should worry—rightly—that Google, open source and Web 2.0 will make us as obsolete as professional travel agents.

We owe the peculiar texture of life in Elsewhere, U.S.A., to a series of slow shifts since the "peachy keen" 1950s that have affected our wallets, families and personal relationships, leaving us lost and alienated in a new land for which we have no guidebook.

The first of these changes is income inequality. On the rise since the 1960s and now at its highest level in nearly a century, it has been largely miscast as a growing gap between rich and poor, when in fact the fundamental shift has been between the rich—and the richer. The difference between the earnings of middle-class families and those on the bottom rung has remained flat, while disparities have grown on the top end of society's ladder—with the distance from the middle to the top expanding 72 percent since 1967. Today, the family at the 95th percentile brings in almost four times the median (or typical) family income of $50,233.

No wonder professionals today feel like they are falling behind even when they are doing well in absolute terms: no matter where you are in the top half of the income ladder, it appears that those just ahead of you are pulling away. (And they are.) As a result, for the first time in labor history, higher earners work more hours than low-income employees. That's right. The more we earn, the more we work. After all, if your billable rate is higher, it costs more to take time off. While 45 years ago a presidential commission worried about how Americans would create meaningful lives with so much leisure time, today we work more hours than any other industrialized nation. We work seven hours more a week than the Germans, for example. This is a reversal of the halcyon days of the 1950s and '60s when we worked less than even the French. (Today we outwork them by six weeks a year!)