Ethics

The Texas Lawyer has a piece by a "professional coach" and psychotherapist, James Dolan, about lawyers' struggle with what he calls "preparing to live syndrome."  (HT: WSJ law blog)  Dolan explains:

To assume that one doesn't have time to grasp the one moment truly in her possession is to fall prey to the fallacy that there are an endless stream of such moments going on and on into the future, only to be seized when the time is right. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course.

This assumption about the unbrokenness of our lives leads people into the PtLS trap, in which we trade what we truly have for what does not yet -- and may never -- exist. Then, living in barely registered pain, many search for relief in addiction, pay raises and promotions and all manner of frantic behavior.

We all know lawyers who hate their jobs and are counting the days to retirement, but I also know a lot of salespeople, business executives, consultants, and secretaries who are counting the days to retirement.  "Living for the weekend" and "living for retirement" are admittedly two of the more depressing outlooks on life, but I don't think these are any more noticeable among lawyers than among other segments of the population.  There is, however, a closely related syndrome that does seem to particularly afflict lawyers and other ambitious professionals (including academics): the "living for the CV syndrome," in which our professional decisions are shaped by CV considerations more than by our own considerations of what we find meaningful, worthwhile, and rewarding.  As I tell my students, your CV should open up doors for you, but it should not cause you to walk past the open door that you really want to enter.  Often, I fear, we make professional decisions as though we're accumulating as much prestige/reputational capital as possible for the next lifetime.  In general, though, the PtL syndrome is a consequence of a competitive culture premised on external motivation (which, as economists might remind us, is not necessarily a bad thing), not of any peculiar attribute of lawyers.