A value judgment

As the president of a Rhode Island electronics company who was pulling down a six-figure income, Win Craft seemed to be riding high three years ago. Then why was he angry and unhappy so much of the time?

‘‘I felt like, ‘OK, I sold 10,000 widgets today. What am I going to do tomorrow, sell 15,000 widgets?’.’’ recalls Craft, of Upton. ‘‘That was no longer motivation. It was starting to feel very empty.’’

In his mid-40s, Craft found himself asking questions that no amount of widget sales could answer: ‘‘What can I do that has more meaning to the world? That has more humanity to it, where I can contribute something? In my head, I had this phrase: Chasing a dream, not a dollar.’’

It is a dream being realized by an increasing number of middle-age professionals: to step off the fast track, away from the jobs that defined the first half of their careers, and devote the second half to occupations that fulfill their desire to help other people.

It often means a substantial cut in pay and a reduction in circumstances in return for what they see as a deeper reward. Craft, a divorced father of two, didn’t just quit his lucrative job. He also sold his house so he could attend Simmons College to pursue a master’s degree in social work — not a field known for its high salaries. Nor does it carry the prestige of being a corporate executive. Yet Craft, now 47, says that when he told friends what he was doing, their reaction was often: ‘‘Gee, I wish I could do something like that.’’

That resonates with Roberta Hurtig. Five years ago Hurtig left a top executive job at an information-services company that paid $250,000 a year to become executive director of Samaritans, a suicide-prevention organization in Boston — even though it paid only one-third of her previous wage. There was no single tipping point that led to the move, just a long period of introspection that intensified after her parents died in the late 1990s. ‘‘It makes you stop and reflect on whether you’re doing with your life what you want to do,’’ says Hurtig, 57. ‘‘I thought: ‘What am I waiting for? I want my work to be important, to have impact.’.’’

Now, she says, it does. When she worked in the corporate world, she used to calculate what it would take to retire at 55. Now, she enjoys her job so much that she’d like to work until her mid-60s or beyond.

‘‘It happens to many of us,’’ says Hurtig. ‘‘It happens to some of us in our 40s, some of us in our 50s, some of us when our parents die. I find that a lot of people reach a point where they ask: Am I doing what I want to be doing? Am I leaving the legacy I want to leave? I feel that kind of journey led me to Samaritans.’’

‘It’s about doing fulfilling work’

Of course, baby boomers did not invent the quest for personal meaning and job satisfaction. But many of them have elevated it to the center of their lives, even if it means turning everything else upside down. In response, an array of ‘‘life coaches’’ and career counselors have rushed to meet the demand; for instance, Hurtig mapped her new path with the help of Essex Partners, a Boston firm that specializes in career transitions for executives.

‘‘There is a movement going on,’’ says Howard Stone of Florida and Rhode Island, a life coach who wrote ‘‘Too Young to Retire: 101 Ways to Start the Rest of Your Life’’ with his wife, Marika. ‘‘It may only be 25 or 30 percent of the [50-plus] population, but they’re getting to the point where they’re asking: What is important to me, and how can I create my future based on what is important to me rather than what I was told as a child should be important to me.’’

Increasingly, as they transition through middle age, what is important to boomers is the opportunity to help others. Rather than wait till retirement to try their hand at community service, they are finding ways to do it professionally, often by marrying the expertise they developed in their previous careers with the idealism they feel they have had to suppress.

Stefan Krug, interim dean of the School of Social Work at Simmons College, says there has been a surge in the number of students in their late 40s and early 50s who are attending Simmons as part of a career change. Somewhat to their surprise, he says, they find that their existing professional skills are vital to social work as well: the ability to communicate, to lead others, to work in groups, to assess issues from multiple perspectives, and to solve problems creatively.

‘‘They’re often motivated by the midlife recognition that they have an opportunity to return to school, make a vocational change, and still enjoy 10 to 15 years of active employment,’’ says Krug. ‘‘They’re also attracted to the values that inform social work, such as social justice.’’

That is what animates another Simmons student, Austin S. Lin, who, at 38, represents the younger part of the middle-age wave. A Harvard graduate, Lin made up to $95,000 per year working in technology; he estimates he could be earning a six-figure salary now if he had stayed in the field. Instead, he expects to make far less once he gets his MSW in May and begins looking for work at a psychiatric unit in a hospital or treatment center.

‘‘I pretty much have taken a substantial lifetime pay cut,’’ Lin says with a smile. But he says it is worth it to act on his belief that ‘‘everyone deserves mental health.’’

‘‘For me, it’s about doing fulfilling work,’’ Lin adds. ‘‘I find people much more interesting than machines. It’s about what the positive psychologists call having a meaningful life.’’

Climbing off the ladder

That is what Win Craft wants too, after decades of climbing the traditional career ladder.

As soon as he received his engineering degree from the University of Michigan in the early 1980s, Craft began working as a computer-chip maker at a semiconductor firm in Florida. Over the next 20 years he was a licensing engineer at an audioelectronics company in Massachusetts, a chief technology officer, a vice president of marketing and sales, and finally president of a semiconductor firm in Rhode Island.

But even as he prospered in the technology boom, with peak earnings of $250,000 a year, Craft began to feel a nagging sense of dissatisfaction. ‘‘I was getting a little antsy,’’ he says. ‘‘That was the first inkling that, hmm, maybe I’m no longer in the right profession. The thought of alternatives to what I was doing flowed around me and rose slowly to the surface.’’

Hoping to solve the riddle, he began seeing a therapist three years ago. For six months, as Craft opened up about his feelings and speculated about jobs that might make him happier — teaching, for instance — he did not mention that the career he most wanted was literally sitting right in front of him: that of therapist. Craft had always been intrigued by the workings of the human mind, and at the back of his own he had long held the idea that being a therapist would be a satisfying way to spend his life. It would afford him, he thought, the challenge of working with people to find solutions to important problems. Still, he kept mum about it in the therapist’s office.

‘‘One day he said to me: ‘Have you ever thought of becoming a therapist?’.’’ recalls Craft. ‘‘And it was like, ding! A light went on. That was a big turning point.’’

Still, shortly before he was supposed to start studying at Simmons in September 2005, Craft got cold feet. Even though he began a small consulting business in technical marketing after he left the semiconductor firm, he became convinced he could not afford his lifestyle, which included paying alimony and child support, if he became a college student in his mid-40s. But he managed to conquer his qualms a few days before school was scheduled to begin.

He says his studies at Simmons have opened his eyes to questions of social injustice he had not focused on before: ‘‘Being a white male upper-class citizen of the United States, you think you know, but you don’t.’’

In May, he will receive his MSW, and he hopes to begin doing individual and couples therapy at a community mental-health center similar to the one in Wellesley where he is now doing a practicum. It will be least a couple of years, he knows, before he can think of opening a better-paying private practice. He estimates that in the beginning, he will make about $40,000 a year from therapy work and his consulting business combined.

He has no regrets. ‘‘I wake up in the morning and think I’ve done something good for the world,’’ says Craft. ‘‘I think I made absolutely the right choice.’’

Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com.