You’re dashing through Kroger and stuck in the check-out line, you’re tapping your foot as your eyes settle on headlines in the news stand, you’re trying to look away but the words are impossible to ignore. You know the ones – those that blare the sluggish (dare we say, nonexistent) job growth during the month of August.
But the numbers concern you.
Of course you’re trying to stay upbeat because you’re fighting, well… depression.
Aren’t we all?
There is the New York Times article summarizing the economic doom and gloom, which only confirms what you’ve been aware of for years – painfully, and personally – and you ponder the Labor Day break and know there is no break when your labor is seeking labor.
Paid labor, that is.
So you shuffle through your line and scan circulars with perky reminders of a colossal clearance here and a seasonal sale there, and you vaguely remember you once enjoyed shopping but your reality is about more pressing agendas: perpetual self-marketing, emotional stamina, Rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul financial finagling.
Dangling over a precipice.
But you smile, you force yourself out into the world, you hold your head high. Because you never know when opportunity may knock.
Yet you move like an alien among “the others” – aware they have their own worries of course, but a pay check isn’t among them.
Data Data Everywhere
Knowing that data is meant to illuminate, knowing that data often obscures, knowing that data doesn’t put a face on the problem, you nonetheless retreat to your reading when you can stomach it, even as one paragraph grabs you by the throat and will not let go:
“The general unemployment rate, which counts only people who looked for work in the previous four weeks, held steady at 9.1 percent. A broader measure that includes people who have looked for work in the last year and people who were involuntarily working part time instead of full time increased slightly to 16.2 percent. The percent of working-age adults who were employed, already at its lowest rate since 1983, was at 58.2 percent.”
But you set aside your data depression and slip instead into your presentable persona: there is a dinner party to attend with friends of friends, and you participate in discussion that runs the gamut from Sex and The City to European travel, from local real estate values to international marketing, from marriage to divorce to single parenting, and finally, to dreams for retirement.
Dreams indeed.
Making a Living, Making Up a Living
Naturally, at one point there is the requisite “what do you do for a living” and your usual response of “I’m a writer” and then the equally routine assumptions that there is plenty of (glamorous) work and certainly a (good) living to be made.
Do you leave it alone?
You opt for a brief mention of evolving industries and professions, of a once-upon-a-time workforce in now struggling sectors, and having dispensed with Darwinian economics, you are relieved when you light on more frivolous fare after drinks at the coffee table and dinner in the dining room even as you glance around and make conversation inside the cocoon of this dutiful double life.
You nod and chat and wonder how many millions play this game and how many more months or years you can manage to keep it up – the public face, the private hell.
And so it is Labor Day and you feel nothing much which is, in and of itself, a break; the anger or impotence you generally experience is quiet. Yet data dances through your head as the sun shines and picnics beckon, as your dreams have little to do with retirement and everything to do with a year-end W-2 instead of the occasional 1099, payment for your skills and knowledge, currency in your palm, and the self-respect that comes from tangible recognition of the value of your labor.
© D. A. Wolf
sigh.. yes yes yes. Still praying for all of ‘us’. This has been one of the toughest weeks so far for me.
Labor Day can be depressing for so many reasons. Here’s wishing that you will prove the exception to the stats, particularly because your well-being serves the good of the group. Your willingness to commune with the generally denied pain of the group (the group talks only money, but it’s a symptom of the real pain of loneliness and fear below) also means that you have something for the group.
Money is energy, and just like information that flows through our collective system, the energy is now stuck because we are collectively scared out of action. We’ve frozen like deer in the headlights of an oncoming truck. Is that truck China and India? And will they end up any better off than us, if they follow our lemming lead off the cliff of growth as the holy grail of happiness?
Or maybe the light that has stunned us into immobility is the rising sun of a new sort of day altogether—one in which we somehow realize that our fear is killing us much more than our lack of resources, our broken and untrusting relationships at every sort of level have made us fear and shun the marketplace itself, from Kroger to Wall Street.
Perhaps if we can love each other to safety we may prove to be like mammals (who attach and nurse and love) in a time where dinosaurs of big fear, big money and big branding puzzle in Darwinian vexation, ebbing life dwindling in the face of comets of global warming and commerce for the sake of competition.
The big reveal, just might be that it’s actually up to us… but at a very small, yet robustly interconnected, level.
Easy to come smack up against that socioeconomic divide at dinner parties. The numbers are truly scary.
If my thoughts could bear fruit, if my wishes had weight, I would change those numbers. (53%, really? Yikes.)
I know the terror and impotence. It lurks in the past, but is not forgotten. No wonder my grandparents never forgot the depression. It changes you to see those depths.
And not a political word in this post; color me not surprised. Every time I say something about how we got into this mess, I get told that Obama should have fixed it by now.
The same folks telling me this are the ones that voted the prior regime in, the folks talking about how overpaid the teachers in the US are, the folks that say that we should make the poor pay more in taxes, and that we should continue to give the big corporations and rich tax breaks because they are the “job makers”.
Yes, happy Labor day indeed.
It seems to me that at this point, Gandalfe, this is a “people” issue affecting Democrats, Republicans, and everyone else with or without a political label. We ought to be looking for “people”-oriented solutions, rather than pointing fingers. (And how anyone can think this mess happened over night, and that a 3 year period could “fix” it, boggles my mind.)
Loneliness, fear and rejection… not being what ‘they’ want. Wondering how long can I hold out… what will I do? I’m still paying a price for being jobless (serious debt) and am clinging to a job that is physically killing me because I seem to have no worth in the job market. Thank you for posting this, BLW
I love the concept of ‘loving each other to safety’, written by ‘Privlege of Parenting.
I strongly recommend you pop over to his site, Coastalharp. You will find beautiful words and a great deal of wisdom.
I don’t know what the answer is to the unemployment situation and the sluggish economy, but whatever we (i.e. the nation’s leaders) are doing or have done over the past few years is not working! Incidentally, healthcare (the field in which I work) added 30,000 jobs in August, and healthcare needs writers too! 🙂 Best wishes to all for a prosperous year and a better situation by next Labor Day!
FWIW, I never stop being amazed by your ability to withstand all that life throws at you. Strong doesn’t even begin to describe how awesome you are. I really, really hope you get that W-2!
I’m working part time now and receiving social security. I finally stopped worrying when I discovered that, if absolutely necessary, Fran and I could survive on just my married social security alone. Not as comfortably as accustomed to, and would have to sell the house and rely totally on public transportation and live cheap (thank God for Medicare). Doubt that will become necessary (we live modestly in any case), but if those last two items (S.S. and Med.) should ever collapse, the country will be gone and that puts everything out of my control. Remember my icon — a pack on my back. Fran’s of the same mind — in fact, worries much less than I do (and had started no retirement plans until about a decade ago and is now retired). I was surprised at her, but there’s a benefit. She won’t be reading any of this, nor worrying about it.