Nice article here by the Observer's fomer political editor on why she quit her job for her family. This seems quite timely, what with the new calls for schoolchildren to be taught a better approach to life/work balance, and to realise that 'having it all' can come at a terrible price in personal happiness.

My parents encouraged me to work very hard at school, knowing full well the drudgery of menial labour in factories and mines, but they made it clear that children and probably marriage were not to be on my agenda. I was to have a successful career. And yet the most successful thing in my life is my marriage - the truth is, I'm not very ambitious, and when I was, I didn't much like myself. My parents were wrong about a career - it does not, in itself, make life worth living. 

Winston Churchill once said: "Find a job you like and you'll never work again," but he was a man with many opportunities in front of him, and I fully admit to not ever having found the 'right' job. In fact I have never got the 'number one' job on my list - I've always had to settle for the second or third.

This is not to say that I wasn't successful. In my chosen field, indeed I was, and at one time I earned more than twice the national average, but I have also never had a job I would rather not have had (if someone would just give me the money instead). I have always resented the intrusion of work into my free time, and the endless hours of overtime required in managerial positions. I endlessly refused promotions, as they would have meant spending yet more time at work and away from the people I loved.

All of this makes me a born freelance, who can pick and choose their work place and work hours, and it's no coincidence, I suppose, that my two brothers and my sister have always been largely self-employed. We all of us prefer to make our own way through life, whether we sink or swim, and this does at least enable us to spend more time with our families.

Anyway, read the article - I'm sure it will strike many uncomfortable chords with those who are parents.   

I thought this article in the Guardian the other day was eminently sensible.

Psychologist Linda Blair lays out her nine best tips for helping yourself, with some background anecdotes. She even quotes my old friend and lecturer Mary Beard, who gave her Milo the strongman as an example from ancient Greece. 

Here are her tips:

* Trust yourself. 

* Break down your problem into smaller parts.

* Clarify your aims. 

* Consider the role you yourself are playing in maintaining your problem. 

* Seek out role models to inspire you. 

* Build on the positive rather than only trying to eradicate the negative. 

* Learn to forgive. 

* Don't expect to find only one answer. 

* Be prepared for change and expect to encounter problems throughout your life.

Well, broadly I'd second all of that. This is very sound advice. And much of it, incidentally, is quite wabi-sabi - a philosophy without which, in the absence of a religious belief, I would probably be dead in the water.

There are all kinds of places you can find something useful to help you through the barrel of shit that is life. Despite a decade of therapy to enable me to try to cope with the legacy of my screwy family, a single Buddhist phrase did more to help me than any amount of Freud: 'No matter what the circumstances of your growing up, you were the recipient of much kindness".

Bingo. That was easy - that single phrase enabled me finally to stop wittering about my awful parents and remember that I had had great teachers, and kindness from the parents of schoolfriends - good role models for how well-adjusted families might actually behave. I did not have to rely solely on my upbringing (not that it was all bad by any means).

Learning to forgive was something I found difficult for a long time. But again, I was saved by just one piece of wisdom from D, a fond parent to two now-adult children. "I do believe everyone is the best parent they know how to be," she said once, and I had another lightbulb moment. I realised that my parents hadn't set out to screw up their marriage and make their children unhappy. This was something that had happened, not something they had designed deliberately. I now understand that they would have preferred to be happy people - they just couldn't find a way to make it happen.

Looking at the role you yourself take in your own problems is something that comes hard to many people. It can take time to realise that it is often your fault if people treat you badly. Two quotes I find useful here are: "No-one can make you feel inferior without your consent," (Eleanor Roosevelt) and "Up to the age of 30 you can blame your parents: after that, you can only blame yourself." The latter quote is anonymous, but its bluntness is bang-on - the world does not owe you a living and if you allow yourself to be scuppered by it, you will go under - and it will be your own fault. After the age of 30, your life is your own product, not someone else's. 

Some of these areas I'm stll working on, such as breaking down a problem into its constituent parts rather than being overwhelmed by it, but that's life I guess - you keep on trying until you drop off the twig. 

Anyway, it's well worth visiting this article and giving it a read. 

The UK's Vodafone survey has found that older workers are happier than younger ones.

Apparently, those over 65 are the happiest of all, while those aged 30-45 are the most likely to suffer from 'mid-career depression'.

The differences between age groups shown in the report are quite striking - 97 per cent of workers over 65 feel 'enabled at their jobs', and 70 per cent of those aged 50 and over said they were fulfilled in their work. But only 50 per cent of 25-31-year-olds could say the same thing.

The 31-35-year-olds are the most negative, with 59 per cent of them feeling undervalued, 49 per cent of them saying they are unfulfilled and around 43 per cent being actively 'demotivated'.

The report concludes that an "inevitable disillusionment" appears to strike workers as they reach their 30s.

Nick Rand of Opinion Leader, one of the firms that conducted the study, said: "Our research showed that Generation Y (those born after 1980) is highly ambitious and wants to succeed in a shorter time span than ever. But with these new, higher expectations comes the risk of greater disappointment." It leads, he says to: "a feeling of mid-career depression brought on by the pressures of the family-life stage.

"This consensus did not come only from those currently in their early 30s but also from those more contented workers in their 40s, 50s and 60s who have emerged on the other side. By most, it is seen as inevitable."

I well remember that feeling of depression at work in my early 30s, that feeling of who am I and what the hell am I doing?

After studying hard at school and college, and gaining qualifications - playing the career game the way you're meant to - I excitedly entered the jobforce in my early 20s. Pretty quickly, I found that it was pants - you're ordered around by complete jobs-worths and given all the menial tasks to do. But you're young, you're fancy-free, you can live on a low salary because you have no commitments and you work your way through it.

By the time you hit your 30s, you've had a few promotions and you're into buying cars and houses and owning things, you expect there to be some sort of reward. 

But there isn't. This is the stage that it dawns on you that this is what you were struggling to obtain, and maybe it's as good as it gets. For every 20 workers there's only one manager. You thought you'd be that manager, but maybe you won't. Maybe you'll just be a drone like everyone else. Maybe you won't make the board of directors. Maybe, just maybe, life won't be all it was cracked up to be.

I didn't have children, and for child-free people it's bad enough, but anyone who becomes a parent quickly finds that the working world doesn't give a stuff if you feel lousy while you're pregnant or Jimmy's got flu today and you have to stay home. Devoting too much time to your family will cost you promotion, preferment and God knows what else, and as a woman, all that equality you thought you had counts for diddly squat - nine times out of ten it'll still be you that gets to take an unpaid day off work. 

Meanwhile, men who married women who were equals can often find themselves becoming traditional breadwinners in a way they hadn't anticipated. Once you get up to two kids, childcare probably costs more than one salary and couples either find themselves working long hours to pay for it or bite the bullet and one of them stays home (usually her). Trapped between up-and-comers on the rungs below, all of them packed with energy and enthusiasm, and career wallahs on the ladder above, keen to hold onto their positions, it can leave men in their mid-30s with a gigantic feeling of 'is this it?' Life in these years is a struggle.

But the truth is, yes, it probably is 'it'. It's in realising this - in accepting that maybe you'll never set the world alight after all and the best you can do is to provide for you and yours, that those of us in our 40s, and moving on into the 50s and 60s mellow out. By this age, we have learned a few tough lessons about life and the disappointments it affords. And we've learned to enjoy the quiet pleasures of having a loving spouse, kids that don't care how important you are, a coterie of sound friendships. 

I think that's a lesson that only comes with time, though, and the only cure for the mid-30s angst is to grow older. But they'll manage it, poor loves. After all, the rest of us have. 

I got a fun press release from Lifesworth this morning.

Apparently, in the UK at least, you're 'worth' the most at the age of 46.

They're talking in terms of personal possessions, of course, not your real worth (don't get me started...). The average mid-life Brit apparently owns about £40k's worth of goods and chattels - more than you ever have in your life before or afterwards. Interestingly, though, that same average Brit also believes their personal possessions amount to about £28k and underinsures them accordingly.

This, of course, is Lifesworth's objective - to get you to up your insurance premiums, but I must confess the idea of being 'worth' £40k made me laugh out loud. I doubt I am 'worth' half this now, and it's very definitely by design.

Over the years, I've come to the belief that people are at their most free and creative when they're not burdened by possessions. Sure, it's great to own things, but once you've got them, you have to worry about them. Clean them, dust them, store them, take care of them, insure them. Is this really a good idea? Better to have plates you can afford to break, clothes you can afford to ruin without there being any heartache involved. Then you don't have to work so hard to support a lifestyle. Maybe you can just have a life instead.

The DH and I, some 10 years ago, were forcibly relieved of much of our burden of possessions by a burglary. After the initial relief that no-one was hurt (the house was empty at the time), came the absolute fury about what had been taken - our wedding presents to each other, the Victorian writing box my parents gave me when I was 16, Steve's favourite watch, the World War II marching compass I'd bought him in six instalments, his entire collection of aviation memorabilia, my late father's clock. There were also our computers, all of our coats, the throws off the sofas, the curtain tie-backs - a strange assortment of finds. It was Christmas, and they had gone shopping in our house. 

A wealthy friend patted me on the head and said: "Trish, they're only things," which only incensed me more because a: his parents subbed his lifestyle and he'd never had to work, and b: many of them were things that I had bought and paid for, worked many hours at a job I hated in order to own. They were MINE, for God's sake.  

And then I thought again. Why exactly was I working all these awful hours in horrible jobs just in order to buy stuff? None of it was necessary stuff - it was pretty, it was nice to have, but it wasn't the roof over my head, it wasn't food on the table. In the grand scheme of things, it didn't make a difference. Sure, it's nice to be surrounded by pretty things, but it's not necessary to fulfilment.

Some of the items had sentimental value, but this too is an imaginary construct. I didn't drop dead for the loss of any of them. And the truth may be something else, too. Every time I looked at that clock I remembered that my mother wouldn't give it to me when dad died but had made me pay £200 for it. Whenever I looked at the writing box, I was chastened by the split it had picked up when I placed it too close to a radiator. Steve had bought his favourite watch the same day as a near-identical one for his ex-wife, which coloured my view of it somewhat. 

A couple of years went by and although we sometimes winced when we thought of what had been taken, we found we didn't need to replace much, other than the work computers. When we did buy, we hit on a strategy of buying only things we could use, not things that were purely ornamental. And gradually, gradually, we began to divest.

I can't remember now what went first, but every year that goes by, we have sloughed off more of our belongings, and every year we feel better for it. We've got rid of clothes, books we'll never read again, ripped all our CDs into I-Tunes and chucked the discs, put item after item of furniture into the local depot vente. The house feels bigger, emptier, more spacious. There is less cleaning to do, less maneouvring around things. Both our lives and our souls free freer for it, and I hope, in time, to get to a stage where nothing I own has ANY monetary value at all. 

I wonder where this would put me on the Lifesworth scale? Probably a complete loser. But I frankly I have no truck with a society where a person's worth is calculated by what they own and not by what they contribute. If the latter was calculated, where on this scale would the average lawyer, PR executive or stockbroker be? A damn sight further down than the lowly-paid nurse or cleaner or ambulance driver.

If you want to calculate your worth on Lifesworth, click here (only relevant to UK residents).

Average age and value of possessions in the UK
20 - £24,548
30 - £34,823
40 - £40,125
50 - £40,454
60 - £35,810
70 - £26,192