It’s been a very dark and enlightening life, these past seven months. Since losing my job last year I have struggled to keep my head up. There’s a point where you are applying for so many jobs that you never hear from that you wonder if any of it matters at all.
I kept at it but then when the interviews lead to nothing things only get more frustrating.
It’s as if all the other jobs you have had, work you have done, and skills and knowledge you accrued are meaningless unless you fit a narrow mold of what a workplace wants. Then you start to see what some of these places want and it’s crazy.
Work places are expecting you to come in with years of experience and a willingness to accept entry level pay. Or they want you to fill several roles that can be full time jobs on their own. Or they want you to be a web site designer or graphic designer as well as doing administrative work, as if those aren’t specialized professional skills that are careers on their own.
As difficult as it is to find work, I can’t help but feel as if these places don’t know what they want or need. They are not looking to help someone become what they need but want to hire their dream employee. And that’s cool. That’s their right, I can’t help but feel as if they are setting themselves and their process up for failure. We never really know which worker is gonna be the perfect addition to a dynamic team just as we don’t know which job is going to challenge and fulfill us. It’s a complicated bit of chemistry to make it all work. The goal for everyone involved should be to find a good fit that becomes a great fit. It should be to find something that, with time, will become ideal.
But there’s a divide between worker and work place when we want more out of the worker than we will give them in return. When we want the work place to act as a person and not a business. When communication is a one way conduit and not a two way system. There are too many shadows in the process of hiring and finding work and now that we’ve accepted that a Gig Economy is the norm, it only complicates things.
Unless that side hustle is a great passion of yours, no one wants to work more than one job. The more jobs you are working then the less you are focusing on any one job. You’re always hustling. Always looking. Never settled. That’s no way to build a business or a life.
The sad thing, and this is a wider focus here, is that the pursuit of wealth, at any cost, is little more than building a house on a base of sand. We are selling the future, we are piecemeal selling the land of America, and we are selling out our workers for a handful of people to get rich and keep getting rich. It creates a system where you will always have companies inflating then collapsing while the boards escape with golden parachutes and the workers rush to find something fast that can pay for their insurance.
It’s a scary scenario, top to bottom, and the Imma Get Mine mentality of greed above people is only setting the future up to be a very dark place indeed.
What we can do is keep working on ourselves and working together to make things better. The more people who care ABOUT people that can get into power then the better things can get for businesses and the better chance businesses have success. It’s not about growing so large as to becom ubiquitous but growing so strong as to be a pillar of the community and beyond.
Things can change.
We just have to do it ourselves.
c
The Spooky World of Chris Ringler 