What's work got to do with it?

A strange aspect of these transitional periods in my life, when between jobs, is that once I get used to the new daily habits so that it often feels like nothing has changed.

When I've left a company on bad terms (having been forced out in a political fight, or betrayed by ambitious colleagues), I sink into a depression, as much over what the experience says about the human race in general, as my own professional disappointment.

But that is not the case with the latest job loss. That job just sort of petered out. We parted with generally good feelings, although I did mourn, for a while, the work I was doing (without interference or encouragement from above) on building a truly useful global news service online.

In America, we have for way too long defined ourselves by what we do, what our job is, or our title, etc. That is starting to change, however. My hope for my native culture is that we adopt some aspects of European and East Asian cultures.

There, if one is a writer, you feel like a writer. People seem much more interested in the quality of your ideas than whether you have written a best-seller or not.

In the U.S., by contrast, writers are pushed to think like businessmen or businesswomen. We always have to worry about marketing and promotion. Editors have virtually disappeared, replaced by MBAs who seem too busy imagining dollar signs to notice the words we've crafted.

So, okay, maybe I am a bit depressed, over the state of my craft and the lack of creative opportunities to pursue it fully. This modest little blog is my main line of "business;" it's made about $12 over the last six months...at that rate I'll receive my next check from Google ($100 minimum required) in about four years.

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