Employment/Unemployment

On or off? Working or not? Creating or reacting?


Life is not binary. It is gradient of many positions. The in-between-ness.


We are not fully straight or gay. Shades of different exist in most things. Conservative or liberal? Neither, thank you; I’m a centrist, borrowing from both of the other ideologies. Somewhere in the middle trying to make things work.


Making things work. Getting back to employment. We are either employed or…what? Idle? Retired? Something else?


I think most of us are something else. We think of things that need doing and then do them. We create our own jobs. We find ways to earn money from doing such. Either the activity pays off or it doesn’t. If it does, we’ve started a business! We are now an entrepreneur.


A risk taker, an entrepreneur sees a need, fills it with service or product and then continues that into the future. A business is made, and others are hired to keep it going. Hired talent extends the entrepreneurs reach. Employment numbers increase from this activity. Job creation comes mainly from small businesses. In America this has been true from our beginning. Still is.


The pandemic has shattered business operations. Shattered, not shuttered. The latter too, but the shatter part is what the pandemic has done in terms of re-defining employment. Old careers have been disappearing for a while now; new ones are taking their place. Startups may be inventing new careers, but workers ought to be creating their own simultaneously. Otherwise the new doesn’t take root.


I think of the millennials and worry they won’t get this. They are the masters of their own future, not the existing social structure of corporations, jobs and careers. They will have to think fully on what they want to do with their lives, what kind of activities will please them and still earn them a living. What effect will their work have on society, the world? Will this become a passion that motivates them through good and bad times? Will they survive on their own wits? And be happy?


I have faith in them. I think they will rise to the challenge and soar like eagles. Don’t you?


In my youth, kids (late teens and twenties) were drugging out and partying. Not me. I was not a risk taker then. I wanted the security of a job and career that would give me freedom to explore life. Work didn’t do that at first, but it eventually did. It took time to realize that what I did with my life was my own to choose. Miraculously it unfolded that way. At the time it didn’t seem like it, but it did.


I was moved by social changes and dangers. I quit my job and went back to school, in my case, seminary. I thought the church was the place social change could be supported. It was and is, but the doing of social justice and making change in society takes a more direct route. I left seminary and worked in human resources, then a university in student development. That led to greater volunteerism and hands-on work to improve social institutions. That led to organizational development and on to consulting. And finally writing and publishing.


It was a fruitful path in the end. Oh, not for money, but for satisfaction and peace of mind. Along the way I can only hope the work made a difference in the lives of others. I will never know that. Faith and hope feel it is so. That’s all I can feel about it.


Meanwhile, tasks remain to be done. We think together. We write together. We plan and act together. Social history is the joinery of all our stories. We are nation. We are community. Rejoice!


Our creations are the in-between-ness of our lives lived purposefully.


July 7, 2020