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Mar 31, 2004

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Troy

hmm. Interesting steps, I think I skipped a few steps when I was out of work for over a year. I guess I don't believe in the natural right to a job/high pay etc. Like some darwinism evolution vidoe game played in fast speed it's "adapt or perish". I think it's quite cool that we live in age where we can change quite rapidly, reinventing and discarding our old selves if we want to and open to the reframing/shedding exercise.

It's one of the reasons I liked being a contractee, as it always keeps me on my gaurd to make sure my skillset is desireable, and I'm aware of the job market and not being taken advantage of. Of course that mindset came after being blind to when the first startup I was with dropped on me "we can't pay you for this month...in fact we are pretty much going to have to close our doors"..this was Christmas month and I also broke up with my serious girlfriend (what a fun month that was!).

I do remember that searching for a job was tough and emotionally troubling. It's hard to recitify with oneself, making big bucks doing important things one day (for several years) and then half a year later looking at the hard cold reality of working 60 hrs at various retail jobs (which are still hiring) is what it takes to pay for rent/food/expenses for a single person in the bay area not living a very lush life. Harder still to recognize that the previous jobs made better utilization of my skills than a rather mindless job stocking shelves. I unlike many was prepared to move (and did) because I recognized that too many were playing that 'wait it out, denial *THIS is silicon valley, it will be great as it once was again* and many had commited to families, spouses who had jobs, children in schools, a decaying victorian house they spent $800K and a year searching for. For which I don't have a great deal of sympathy for, as prioritiy wise in the scale of things and time it's pretty superficial, you'd think people would remember that turning on the news and seeing parts of the world are lucky to have a house that's not being blown apart, and their children sent off to war.

Throughout time people have faced worse displacements: sea fishermen, the old wooden printing presses, stagecoach by the railway, mom & pop stores being displaced by walmart, independant book stores via amazon.com wagon wheel repairmen via cars, factory workers via machine (cotton gin, car assembly robots) etc. This is a drop in the buckey compared to those diplaced by wars, starvation, disasters (e.g. chernoble), imagine sailing to america on a boat with almost nothing!

It's denying reality to think that life provides any lasting security plan -within hours an unseen massive asteroid, earthquake, volcano (like the Yellowstone caldera) could and most likely will wipe out the majority of life on this planet (as it has in the past)-. neither will shaking our fists trying to hold on to hte past, bring back the green of the burnt forest that was dried and would have burned one way or another..but it will blind us from seeing the phoenix rising from it's ashes!

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