Blue Monday.

Let's just say, with apologies to Rob Schwartz, that for about the past two years our work-life balance has been more than a little bit, ahem, askew.

In fact, if our work-life balance were a person, he'd be walking around like Charles Laughton's Quasimodo in "The Hunchback of Notre Dame."

I suppose in the impecunious parlance of today (where it's considered fair that some people make $77 million while others are let go or are wage frozen, simply because some semantic-assassin has dubbed them 'job creators,') we are supposed to feel lucky, simply because we have staved off the worst of the worsening American economy.

I am not working at Starbucks, or wearing an orange jumpsuit and picking up litter along the Grand Central Parkway.

But the real fact is--the detail no one wants to notice or do anything about, is that people are suffering. Working day-in and-out, every night and weekend, leaving two weeks of vacation on the table, because if you take it you might be...is not peculiar behavior, it's systemic.

I'm afraid we're working ourselves to death.

The trouble is, I'm more afraid of the alternative: unemploying ourselves to death.