The Existential Dread of Retirement

Retirement is a brutal business. I know a man who retired recently who had been in business for fifty years. Now he doesn't know what to do with himself. He enjoyed the driving off to work and being involved with people and the camaraderie any work environment brings. He always put work first. It was the most important thing to him and he would always tell me about the projects he was involved in.  He was happy in his work.

But now he is retired and the existential creep is settling in. Most people defer this until the day they can no longer. Staying busy and workaholism is very American. A busy person is a successful person. All those writers staying at home pity them. What they must do all day? And how can they stand not going off to work? But then...then work betrays even the most diligent and vanishes over the next hill like a bad uncle.

And you are left standing there alone. And all those years of never considering your place in the universe come crashing in. It is not just not having anything to do it is the existential dread of the moment put off for years and years. Death seems to be lurking in the closet or the bathroom or the garage. All one can do is take a deep breath and accept the moment.

It has really been there all along. You just didn't know it.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher....sometimes a dream is all you have
 

The Permanent Unemployed of the coffee houses

As a writer I am in a lot of coffee houses and man you see them everywhere. The unemployed men you pick them out in a second. They are a lot of white guys with beards and goatees. Grey haired. They meet people in the coffee shops and talk in hushed voices. They read with the paper hiding their face. They meet at park benches and walk up and down the street with other men. They are the displaced work force of the Great Recession who will probably never go back to work. Like cattle they have been marginalized early in the ungracious retirement that is a massive economic realignment.

Call it what you will but the economy will become something else. It will become a cyber based green based machine that will be global in scope. It will move away from brick and mortar and the jobs offered will be different than those that exist today. The upheaval of the economy is a massive displacement of people and skill sets that have experienced sudden obsolescence. This is not a pause, this is a metamorphosis that will shed older workers like leaves that have grown brittle.

The young workers will fill the funnel first and then there might be some filling in. But middle aged white men will not be called up. There has been a fundamental shift in the tectonic plates of our everyday life and the slushy credit market that allowed companies to carry people in bloated management does not exist and will not exist again. That great run started by the greatest generation fizzled with the rise of China and the implosion of the derivative market. The funny money of twenty years vanished into the Monopoly board and left only the players...but without a game or money or properties worthless, the game is shelved for the new reality of  Don't Wake Daddy...because daddy has nowhere to go.

William Hazelgrove's new novel Rocket Man is due out in September. The story of a man who moves to the suburbs and loses his mind. www.billhazelgrove.com

The Wolves will come--our invisible unemployed

We will forget them. How long were you there? Twenty five years. Just like that. You? Fifteen years. Just like that. Did you notice how fast the day goes when you are unemployed? I'm not good at this. I just want a job. They are here again. The coffee house lost days of the unemployed. Me and them. We are all invisible now. Writers are always invisible, but now all these men are invisible too. Many will never return. The recession will end and they will not find purchase in this new economy.

The dirty secret. In this culture if you become old then you are done. Passed over for the younger employee. They are wandering around in my domain now. I have always been the inverse of the working man, haunting the coffee houses of midday with a laptop and a book. But now they are here. I can hear them now. How long have you been off. A year. A year and a half. Who is your headhunter? Can you get a job anywhere now? For a lot of people this is a new sensation. For the first time highly educated people have been made redundant. The best and the brightest of other generations are pounding the pavement. Could it be there are just too many people now?

Like the housing market we are awash in too much inventory. There are too many people looking for work. Who will employ these millions. College students join the ranks every day and they are young. They can give sweat and effort. What can the older experienced worker give in the new economy? We don't' really know. All we know is that there are so many people looking for positions that have dried up or have been eliminated. We have seen this before in the blue collar industries. People replaced by robots or factories closed and jobs shipped overseas. But now the people who always assumed they would have a job have been put out to pasture years ahead of retirement. The old economy died under them and they have no place to go.

Will our new cyber based green economy snatch up these people. Will our new energy efficient Juggernaut need all this old economy talent. Or have we created a cyber world where people are pushed aside with the click of a mouse. Can we have an economy that needs all those people skills or does that belong to a brick and mortar world gone by?

I don't have an answer and neither does anyone else right now. But they are here. And we will ignore them when it all starts up again. They will become invisible, members of the permanent unemployed. The Indians used to leave their older members behind on the prairie with wood for a fire and a blanket. When the wood burned out they would freeze to death. Then the wolves would come.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/