Life Without a Net

Well, that year wasn’t any fun.

We were still stuck in the tar pit of recession. People who a few years before had snuggled deep into what they imagined was a clearly mapped future of economic security and rising home values realized it was all coming apart. They had to make choices, big ones, about the directions of their lives and livelihoods.

Charlotte, like the nation, owns plenty of those stories as it staggers into a new decade. Here are two. One is about a woman who realized, suddenly, that she and her career were separate things. Another is about a man who seemed years ago to have reached the same conclusion, then chose to double back to the career he’d left. Sort of.

As it happens, I meet Emily Achenbaum Harris for coffee a day after the announcement that Editor & Publisher, the venerable trade journal that covers the newspaper industry, was shutting down. To a pair of veteran newspaper reporters, this seemed like the tolling of the big bell. The explanation, from Nielsen Business Media President Greg Farrar, was vintage corporate media newspeak: “This move will allow us to strengthen investment in our core businesses – those parts of our portfolio that have the greatest potential for growth – and ensure our long-term success.” Translation: There’s not much point in continuing to publish a trade journal covering a dying trade.

For years, the trade dominated – defined – Emily’s life. Mine, too. We were colleagues and friends at The Charlotte Observer, where we worked as reporters. In March 2007, the Observer published a story of hers about a mentally retarded Anson County man accused of murder under suspicious circumstances and held without trial for 14 years. The man, Floyd Brown, was freed, thanks largely to Emily’s reporting. This is the sort of story reporters can hang careers on; Emily pulled it off before she hit 30.

The Michigan native left to work for The Chicago Tribune in early 2008. A year later – a few months after I took a buyout from the Observer, a few weeks after The Tribune Co. filed for bankruptcy – she was back in Charlotte with her fiancée. She’d told Tribune readers in a column: “I’m leaving to see how self-sufficient I can be. I’m going to try growing our own vegetables, learn how to can and preserve them, and shop locally for everything else.”

A few years ago, I – hell, everyone we’d worked with – would have approached Emily and gently asked her if she was OK, possibly offering to e-mail her a list of therapists. But I’d been through 2007 and most of 2008 in the newspaper industry, and believe me, compared to that, growing and canning vegetables sounded sweet.

“It got to the point where I thought, ‘I’m going to quit or I’m going to crack,’” she says, dunking morsels of muffin in her coffee. “The big thing was the sensation of, ‘I have no control over my life. I could lose my job at any time.’ The industry was collapsing before my eyes, and there was no other news organization where I wanted to go. It basically was a pre-emptive strike. It felt that inevitable.”

But that was only the half of it, really. Ex-newspaper people have their own unofficial fraternity, and we talk. When we do, we speak with sad resignation about the economic reality that has gutted newspapers: Essentially, when they lost their dominance of advertising markets to online and other platforms, the game was over.

What gets us boiling, though, is the corporate doubletalk, like Greg Farrar’s, directed by people who should know better at people who do. Papers nationwide cut staff and news hole while desperately latching onto (and assigning staff to) whatever new, shiny object they thought might draw a few more readers – Twitter, Facebook, rapid-fire stories on the Web, interactive this and that. All well and good, but managers’ demand for in-depth stories never flagged, and they continued to insist, to staff and public, that the wave of buyouts and layoffs wouldn’t lessen their commitment to quality journalism.

Toward the end of 2008, even as Emily was helping cover Barack Obama’s preparation for the presidency, having thought her career and life were made, she began thinking along the same lines. “Do I want to be a full-time Twitterer? No, I don’t, actually,” she says. “Do I want to be in a shrinking newsroom where I’m being told that we’re still serving readers the same? I don’t want to do that for five years, no, thank you … and if I’m going to work at a dissatisfying job, why am I making this salary and working on Christmas Eve?”

So what now?

She married Erik Harris, a software programmer, and they live in a 1,200-square-foot brick ranch house on a three-quarter-acre lot in east Charlotte. She’s expecting her first child, a daughter, in late January. She’s freelancing a bit and volunteering for a China Grove nonprofit that cares for abused and rescued horses. She’s written 150 pages of a novel “about vigilante justice and race horses.” (Hmm.) She’s trying to grow food. Trial; error. “The things that died? Wow. The list is so long,” she says. “The pumpkins really looked like they were going to make it.”

But this isn’t exactly a case of a 31-year-old woman who suddenly finds herself careerless and tries to cobble together a new life out of spare parts. There’s a method to all this. Emily researched it before she quit. It’s called “voluntary simplicity.” In essence, it means living the life you want on as little money and material goods as you can, or care to. That’s another thing she’s done: launched a blog, Little House on the Southern Prairie (littlehousesouthernprairie.wordpress.com), chronicling her new life. (Check out the post on the baby snake. Fun-ny!)

“I still think good journalism can be world-changing and life-changing. I was just seeing a lot less of that,” she says. “But I managed to isolate what I love about journalism – I have to write, and I have to make a difference in the community. I still do those two things.”

It’s not as if she’s gone completely off the grid. She doesn’t want to. She still lives comfortably, has a computer, has a car. (She also freely acknowledges that, with an employed and supportive husband, she can afford to; it’d be a much tougher proposition if she were still single.) But, she explains, she’s no longer on the treadmill of thinking constantly about the next promotion, the next bonus, the next job, and what those might buy her. Instead, she’s asking an essential question: What is wealth, really?

Her provisional answer: “Being able to have as much time as possible to do the things I want.”

She and Erik are still working out the details.

“That’s definitely part of the learning curve – what we like, what we don’t like, what’s fantasy and idealistic, what’s realistic,” she says. “We don’t want to live without a TV and computer. I’d rather buy eggs from a local farmer than have chickens myself. Erik would never want to go without air conditioning.

“So it’s kind of a game: ‘How much electricity can we cut back on?’ ‘Cause everyone has a different threshold.”

Not surprisingly, she’s taken some ribbing, both from friends who think she’s nuts for giving up her career and from those who think she’s a dilettante ascetic because she still has Internet access. Whatever. “I’m definitely happier,” she says. “The job seemed that hopeless, whereas now I feel that there are so many possibilities in front of me.”

And one of her unexpected, though humbling, pleasures has been learning what she doesn’t know.

“How was I allowed to graduate from high school,” she marvels, “without knowing when to plant spinach?”

Geoff Owen spent three years as a finance officer for Wachovia, managing the issuance of tax-exempt bonds and the like, then just got sick of it. The employees in the unit he was in seemed to care less about shareholders than about their own portfolios, and the job struck Geoff as a cold, meaningless way to make a living.

In 2005, he and his attorney wife, Missy, opened their own business, Owen’s Bagel & Deli, in South End. It was rough at first, but gradually business picked up, and Geoff stayed true to his original idea of a small, homey deli that’d stay intimate and friendly to its customers and treat employees to an occasional early shutdown if they’d done enough business. As 2010 approached, the deli was doing fine and Geoff had hired a full-time manager, meaning he no longer had to put in 18-hour days. He’d taken his chance, followed his gut and built a success out of nothing, his way.

You’ve heard this story before. It’s a staple of places like Austin, Texas, and Portland, Ore., where the Frank Zappa clone frothing up your latte behind the counter at Chilly Bean Coffee & Sundries turns out to be a former probate attorney. He was plenty good, of course, editor of the law review, cum laude grad, pulling down six figures at 28, on his way to making partner, but man, the work was such a drag, and he couldn’t see himself at 55 hammering out another brief, so he opened this little coffee shop, and he’s enjoying life and roller-blading to work every day. Like that.

Except Geoff did something weird, or reverse weird. He went back. We talked the evening of his second day at a new job as a financial adviser. (He declined to identify the firm.)

He still owns the deli, though, which makes for strange careerfellows. “I had a customer tell me, ‘Man, you should name a sandwich Sell Your Soul to the Devil,’” he says, laughing.

So what happened?

“We’d achieved our goal, you know, built a deli for the neighborhood. I’m not creative, but I’d like to think we’ve created a place where people can be creative,” Geoff says. “It had just gotten to the point where I was counting straws and mustard packets, and I realized I’d kind of made myself expendable.

“I’ve just had the opportunity in the last couple of years to learn a little about myself. I have an MBA, and I’m a lot better at this than at restaurants. I guess it’s returning to a core strength of mine. It’s building relationships with people and hopefully having a positive impact on their lives. That’s what we tried to do with the deli, and this position affords me the opportunity to do the same thing.”

Geoff, who grew up in Cleveland, is like thousands of transplanted Rust Belters who moved to Charlotte in the boom years of the early 2000s. He and Missy were living in Pittsburgh before they moved in 2002, and they settled in nicely with their careers. But both felt something was missing.

“My wife and I were living in Charlotte, lower case, but not Living in Charlotte, upper case,” he says. “We were not really establishing ourselves here, making connections, getting involved in the community.”

Thus the deli idea was born. Geoff had earned his undergraduate degree at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, home to a well-established deli shop and restaurant that steamed its bagel sandwiches. Good idea, Geoff thought.

But once the deli began earning a profit, he intentionally steered it away from runaway success. Some days, he’d close early. He consistently rejected offers to expand to other locations. When the economy began tanking, he set up a job nook in one corner, where customers could take advantage of free Wi-Fi, soup, tea and coffee while they looked for jobs. The Owens have always donated food and a percentage of the deli’s earnings to area nonprofits.

“We don’t operate on all the b-school’s advice. It’s our fault, and it’s our greatest strength,” he says. “You see these restaurants going out of business left and right … but we don’t beat vendors down, and we stick with employees for the long haul. We’ve had a certain sense of loyalty, and customers want to make sure businesses like ours make it. And we’ve been incredibly fortunate.”

Then again, Geoff is 37. He has two daughters, ages 3 and 5. The freedom you win by being your own boss is offset by the responsibility that comes with being someone else’s boss and having a business venture ride, entirely, on you. Somebody broke in overnight? Your problem. Planning a Saturday trip? Hope nobody calls in sick. Paperwork, payroll, arranging benefits for you and everyone else …

“Sometimes you just want to have your health insurance taken out of your paycheck,” he says with a sigh. “Just take one decision off your plate.”

So he’ll keep owning it, but his friend Richard will manage it, and Missy will help oversee the books. The child can look after itself now to some extent, and Geoff can get back to doing what he’s suited for.

And here’s the funny thing: As risky as starting the deli was four-plus years ago, taking a job as a financial adviser in the midst of a recession might be even riskier. Geoff is fond of saying he expects his kids to work at the deli someday. But who knows? He might find himself working alongside them.

“I guess,” he says, “I’m just one of those who likes working without a net.”

~ Greg Lacour