The 10’s started in the midst of a global recession and has ended with global democracies making a huge swing to the right and an ever growing concern that we will all die in a huddled mass between a rising sea and a scorched land.
On a brighter note, the UK has the lowest unemployment in… I’m not sure of the official statistic but it seems irrelevant if you personally are not in a secure place.
I know i haven’t been, I’ve been employed but gone through three redundancies in as many years. All of them have been “good job” yet I, like so many others, find myself relying on credit to pay basic living costs let alone save for an uncertain future.
I see so many businesses closing in droves, the high street has more closed shops than open ones.
The ability to get a job and work your way up to a reasonable pay and a pension seems impossible, where do you go to work?
The age old wisdom of: buy a property and the investment will pay you back when you downsize is irrelevant to most people who are priced out of even the smallest property.
Most people will spend the majority of their wage just trying to keep a roof over their head.
For us this pattern of events culminated in three redundancies in as many years.
We were lucky enough to have a mortgage on the smallest house we could fit our family into. So we paid about two thirds of someone renting a similar property.
But three redundancies brought us close to losing it. What do you do with the knowledge there wasn’t a cheaper alternative? there’s only so savvy you can be.
Every time we thought we’d got our lives back on track, the rug seemed to be pulled from under our feet.
It was easy to think that we either had awful luck or that we had done something wrong or were not worthy enough.
However when we checked in with friends and family who we always saw as having it all together they all felt the same way.
It’s easy to get to the head space that the world is **********
But what else can you do?
Do you give up? Or do you pick yourself up and try again?
I wanted to give up…
But I had a family so I didn’t feel that was an option.
I got another job and we pay our bills each month but that Cliche that’s often attributed to Einstein kept ringing in my head:
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”
I lived in fear that it could happen again. Perhaps it was time for a perspective shift.
I’ve just written and cut my answers to the above, perhaps I’ll send them in the future but in short:
How we work, shop, manage our money communicate and live our lives has changed. Of course we’re going to see a shift in our economy.
It’s broken so many of our norms I wonder if that’s why we’ve seen such a sea change in our politics. Are we hoping that holding on to the past will protect us from the future?
Here’s a question:
Why did we work for other people in the first place?
Answer:
Assets and resources.
If you wanted to be a writer or photographer, you couldn’t just write stuff, you needed a newspaper or publisher.
If you wanted to be a top chef you needed a restaurant with a kitchen and customers and a good reputation.
If you wanted to teach you needed a schools with classrooms, and students.
If you wanted to be an accountant you needed an office where people could bring you bags of receipts, and filing cabinets to keep said receipts in.
If you wanted to be an artist you needed a gallery to buy or sell your art.
An actor you needed a television channel or film studio to capture you on film and project you to the world.
Do you think those things are relevant any more?
Is there anything an office can do that even a basic smartphone can’t?
If you’ve ever had a job at some point someone has traded your skill or service for money, given you a wage and profited from you. If they haven’t the business has gone under and you’ve lost your job.
When I speak to people they usually have two reasons for working for someone else.
I definitely always thought selling was dirty. But selling has changed from “outbound” to “inbound”.
I’ll explain that in another email.
For now think on this: