"Pride, in short, begets perseverance. All of which may explain why, when the repo man is at the door, people so often remind themselves that they still have their (pride), and that it’s worth something. Because they do, and because it is. However much pride may go before a fall, it may be far more useful after one." --from "When All You Have Left is Your Pride" by Benedict Carey in today's Times We have never yet figured out why it's so hard for us to hold a job. True, a lifelong lack of self-esteem has sent us to ever-sillier and less-consequential jobs, and we tend to question authority in completely inappropriate ways. That's a bad combination. We're not proud of it and we don't think it means that we're smart. We think it might mean that we have a hard time distinguishing appropriate behavior and regular social cues. True also that many people find us entitled and arrogant. Hmm. We think some of these people came to work needing to find something like that. We're trying to tell you that we don't think we're too good for work, and we're not ashamed of hard work, and, even as we wrote that sentence above about "silly" work, we're not really putting anything down. We spent one very pleasant summer handling phone orders for the 'wichcraft chain of sandwich shops, and, in addition to bringing us about as close to Tom Collicchio as we ever hope to be, it was a lot of fun and we got to eat a great sandwich every day. It wasn't silly at all, except some fashionistas' need to know that there is not one single tiny atom of fat in their fat-free lattes is a little silly. Each to his or her own. However, as more and more people lose their jobs and try to arrange their lives around a routine that either isn't working (like pretending they're still employed) or won't be working for quite a long time (like looking for a new job), we find that we have a lot of sympathy for these newly-unemployed. It is very difficult to give yourself permission to be unemployed, but you're going to have to do it. If you don't, even if you do get a new job as soon as you can, you're going to have bad memories about this time in your life. You might hang on too closely to your next job, or you might take the first thing that comes up, or the thing that seems steadiest, instead of the job that's right. Attitude is crucial. (So is cutting down on your extraneous expenses and concentrating on the things that count, but you'll find other blogs to tell you how to do that). If you look on your time of unemployment as a period of failure, you'll always feel (at least a little) like a failure. Try to remember that you are still yourself, and that you existed before this job and you are still existing after it. Our parents lived and worked in a world where you only got fired for embezzlement or trying to kill the boss. (In some advertising agencies, you could only get fired for doing both at the same time). Whenever we got fired--we've already admitted it was more than the average working jane--they felt it as a judgement on themselves. Our own generation has moved jobs and 401k's frequently enough, has changed careers one time or more and have come to believe that work serves life (instead of the other way around, which came to its reducto ad absurdum in the crash of '87.) Still, we went though enough business-card mixers in which your next paycheck, promotion or sex act could depend crucially on your job title. A lot of us still think we are our job and nothing more. The big challenge of this new economy, outside of keeping food on the table and the kids in school, is going to be keeping our sense of self, our identity as individuals, even though it is unsubstantiated by paycheck or perks. It's going to be difficult, but we've found, from long experience, that it is possible.
