september 11 gah
I can't help but notice that the ultra dry job market and the variables causing it are changing the way people treat each other and show up for each other outside of the context of work, and not in a good way. I'm not saying that people are consciously choosing to be harder, colder, more distant, and less generous, but it's definitely happening. And it's not hard to see where it goes.
Colleagues who may have become friends stay colleagues and friends who were once colleagues turn back into pumpkins, the instinct towards connection erodes under the pressure caused the idea that you're competing against the rest of your network. Eventually, you start to see everyone else as a threat. Eventually, keeping your job becomes your job. It makes sense, but only within a zero-sum context.
Still, I get it, and I sympathize, because people don't actively choose this kind of thing, but it warrants mentioning that if you have friends, family members, neighbours, or former colleagues who are struggling to find work, who spend their days sending resumes and cover letters into the void, who are starting to doubt themselves and their abilities more and more every day, take a moment every now and then and reach out to them. Return that phone call, that email, that text. Offer them some help. Make inquiries at your place of work, pass along job postings, and facilitate introductions if you can, and, if you can't, make time for a cup of coffee or a happy hour beer. Everyone treating everyone else like competition instead of community might seem like a good idea in a dog-eat-dog world, but if you saw a dog eating another dog you wouldn't think it was natural or normal.
^^ I posted that on LinkedIn today because, like, who cares. Maybe we'll all be dead in four years. Maybe this is all a simulation. I simply don't know anymore.
I don't know how we are supposed to get on and get by in a world that is teetering on the edge of destruction. And yes, the world has always been teetering on the edge of chaos, of catastrophe, but not out and out destruction. That's a last seventy years thing. The people with their fingers on the triggers and the buttons want us to think that it's all inevitable so we too put our fingers on triggers and buttons, but I can't and won't. I refuse to. I refuse to believe that I live in a world where people don't marvel at sunsets or feel deep, magical satisfaction when they love and are loved. I refuse to believe that we're all going to end up as sociopathic cannibals. I simply can't accept that this is how it is and how it will be because that's just so fucking stupid.
Anyway, it's the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and I didn't want to write about 9/11 so I wrote about our current moment.
🌲 gonna and
🌼 go the
🌱 touch beat
🌳 grass goes
🌷 now on
Be good to yourself.
If you enjoyed this post, click the little up arrow chevron thinger below the tags to help it rank in Bear's Discovery feed and maybe consider sharing it with a friend or on your socials.