Half-listening to an NPR show the other day, I heard a guest who works with people who have been laid off refer to losing a job as "one of the most traumatic" things that can happen to you.
If true, I'm probably suffering from PTSD by now, as my career has been so riddled with unexpected layoffs, transfers, company closures, and other untenable circumstances that forced me to move on. My father's generation grew up with an expectation that a job was pretty much for life, or that at least a series of jobs within a single company or a small number of companies was what his future would hold.
Many of us who came to age in the 1960s rebelled against that life model, opting instead to create or join alternative institutions, build them from the ground up, and eventually move on to the next challenge.
"Serial entrepreneurs," you might call us.
There's nothing wrong with this model; it's one way the society grows and becomes more productive. Small businesses generate many of the best new ideas and products that enter our economy, and it's always been that way.
But this lifestyle, which carries additional risks to those working within more traditional careers, becomes extremely difficult to balance with supporting a family. The hours a person burns worrying about their kids during periods like the present one are one of the worst types of stress I see around me, as well as within myself.
It almost feels as if you are "making yourself sick with worry" -- one thing my father always warned against. I wished I'd listened to him better, or somehow picked up his coping skills, which were much less self-destructive than those prevalent in my generation.
The skies have darkened today; the weeks of sunshine have passed. It's so very gloomy, inside and out.
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