One thing I WILL mention, as an elder millennial who doesn’t live in the old-world paradigm of “work/life balance,” but instead in the paradigm of “work/life blend” and I can attest to how that affects how we work in the modern workforce compared to how our parents, grand parents, and great grand parents might have. Most of the folks I have worked with over my career have the same work arrangement, which is a double edged sword. It’s counter-intuitive, but the “flexible modern working arrangements” don’t offer some of the freedoms some folks might expect.
When the two generations before me went hunting during the work week, they took time off from work. Work/life balance. One end of the see-saw was work, one end was life - never touching in the middle. So they took time off and were actually, 100% off. But in their world, you worked 45-60 hours out of 5 specific 12 hour windows during the 5 day workweek. You were either there and working, or you weren’t and weren’t.
For my career, I’ve lived the more progressive “work/life blend.” I’ve filed exactly 5 days of vacation in the last 15yrs, my honeymoon. I’ve taken conference calls with our executive team on a satellite phone while fishing in Alaska, taken text messages from work in the middle of skinning a freshly shot coyote, and send emails from my deerstand all season long. I take half or full days to go scouting here and there, work on my ranch as needed, go to the state fair with my wife, catch my son’s football games, etc - all taking time out of a normal 6-6 M-F work day, without ever taking time off. But I know when I go check game cameras in the morning, I’ll be working at 1am that night to make up the workload. I give the same 45-60 hours, but spread over a 168 hour, 7 day week.
The upside is the liberty and autonomy to break up my day to enjoy my life without wedging myself into a “work for the weekend” lifestyle with my family. For example, today, I loaded ammo for a match this weekend while I was negotiating budgetary contracts for equipment with a couple of vendors on the phone.
BUT - the DOWNSIDE is the fact that tether works both ways. I give my company 24/7 access to me, expecting them to take about 60 hours out of every 168 hour week - and they expect to get it. So “vacation” is a very loose term - I don’t tell my boss I’m going on vacation next month, I tell him I’m working out of the office. My liabilities and expectations really don’t change much - it’s just accepted that for 25 days a year, I won’t answer phone or email for a day or so, instead of being immediately available. Going a full two weeks without any contact to work isn’t a thing. Going on even a full week vacation without phone or email is unheard of.
What all of that means for me: it’s really hard to bend to make time for traditional styles of hunting. My grandpa and his brothers used to take a week and a half of vacation and spend deer camp together. My deer season really doesn’t work that way. I have my phone for emails, sometimes my laptop in my pack, and I spend my evenings working. That’s the downside of being blended with your work instead of balanced. So as more and more workplaces adopt more modern working arrangements, I think folks will be unpleasantly surprised how difficult that world is to apply to certain pastimes like hunting.
The United States population was 205 million in 1970, making the number of people who were counted as hunters 20 million, 500 thousand. The population of the United States in 2010 was 309 million, and five percent of that is 15 million, 450 thousand. So in fifty years, hunters have decreased less than 25%. It may be accelerating, but that's roughly a 2% loss per year.
