Career Corner is a program produced by the Minnesota Radio Talking Book Network, part of State Services for the Blind and it is recorded for people who are blind or have reading disabilities. You can find complete programming of the Radio Talking Book at www.mnssb.org/rtb and the password is rtb. Your host for Career Corner is Anne Obst. (music) We turn now to an article from the New York Times, Rising to Your Level of Misery at Work, from SEPT. 5, written by Arthur C. Brooks EVERYONE has heard of the Peter Principle: Managers rise to the level of their incompetence. Today, however, a whole class of hyper-competent Americans will never find their level of incompetence. Instead, they will suffer a similar principle in which they rise to their level of misery. Here’s how it works: Ambitious, hard-working, well-trained professionals are lifted by superiors to levels of increasing prestige and responsibility. This is fun and exciting — until it isn’t. People generally have a “bliss zone,” a window of creative work and responsibility to match their skills and passions. But then the problems start. Those who love being part of teams and creative processes are promoted to management. Happy engineers become stressed-out supervisors. Writers find themselves in charge of other writers and haranguing them over deadlines. In my years in academia, I saw happy professors become bitter deans, constantly reminiscing about the old days doing cutting-edge research and teaching the classes they loved. Why don’t people stop rising when they are happy? Because we are built to think that more is better — more power, authority, money and responsibility. So we incorrectly infer that promotions will equal greater satisfaction. In an economy that has left so many people behind in recent years, this might seem like a nice problem to have. But it is a problem nonetheless, as recent research clearly demonstrates. In 2009, scholars from the University of Illinois published a study in the journal Social Indicators Research charting the relationship between success and stress. Not surprisingly, poverty was a predictor of stress, as a lack of resources puts great pressure on everyday life. But interestingly, wealth also increased stress, probably because of high-pressure work with time constraints. So while success may initially relieve stress as people rise into the middle class, it seems to introduce a whole new set of stressful problems for those who keep climbing. So what’s the solution? Here’s one that many people try: Drink a lot. Research from 2010 found that people with high incomes reported consuming more alcohol than people of more modest means. Specifically, 81 percent of respondents making over $75,000 per year drink alcohol, versus 66 percent of those making $30,000 to $49,000 and 46 percent earning under $20,000. If strategies like drinking seem less than satisfactory, one might take the problem head-on instead: Identify the bliss zone and get back into it. An unhappy dean should resign and go back to the happy professorial life, right? Easier said than done. People are wired for progress, and regression looks and feels like failure. Furthermore, if one is a manager long enough, one risks falling behind in the skills in which one previously, happily functioned. If the road back is blocked, are there other options? A clue comes from scholarship on jobs designed to serve others. In 2014, two researchers published an article in the Journal of Positive Psychology looking at the lives of lawyers. They found that lawyers in high-income fields like corporate law, tort and malpractice were unhappier and less satisfied than their lower-paid counterparts in service roles such as public prosecutor or legal defender. (Not surprisingly, they also drank a lot more.) Does this suggest quitting and joining the Peace Corps? Not necessarily. In the immortal words of the Bhagavad Gita, “The renunciation of work and work in devotion are both good fo...