I just got the word that the job I’ve had for only six months is ending and I will return, after my fourth downsizing in as many years, to the ranks of the unemployed. I have been doing this dance since 2005, and haven’t gotten used to it yet.
It is very easy for us to lose sight of the individuals in the vast numbers of the unemployed, and it’s easy to only see it as an economic issue. But it isn’t. If only it were that simple.
Losing your job can mean losing your whole identity.
I can say honestly that I see how people slip into hopelessness. It is alwayas the hardest when it happens ater many years of sacrifice and loyalty to an employer. To be cast aside, even with a check and a few months health insurance, can be heart-stopping. It is too much like that episode of The Twilight Zone, where people are regularly and without thought declared “obsolete.”
So many of us become so wrapped up, dedicated, or just afraid to lose our jobs that they become bigger than a paycheck. But for me, that is all a job has become. I have been told to go home one time too many. Like a person burned by love, I don’t get my hopes up.
Most of us are guilty of thinking that one day we will leave our job, not that the job will leave us. Like realizing you built your house on shifting sand. Only most of us realize too late, after giving everything of ourselves just to make it work. We don’t think about the facts of it, until the end. The fact that we are only one of many… that we can be replaced… that we are not special, but instead, just a series of numbers in a computer. And when that number comes up, you stop getting paid. It is a wonderful system.
The way so many of us are let go makes us bitter. It hurts. We grieve our old life of employment and the comfort we once knew. But the cold corporate goodbye leaves much to be desired. It can be damaging in many ways.
I will probably tell my grandchildren about the days when people got a job and stayed with it for life… not out of necessity always, but sometimes out of passion for the work. A time when skill was valued. When there was a thing called a work ethic that many abandoned over time.
I’ll tell them about a day when people actually thought that if they worked hard and long enough, they would retire on a beach or wherever they wanted until they died. I’m sure they’ll laugh and accuse me of exaggeration. I mean, it was only the American dream. Dream being the operative word.
Feedback