We met in the dog run, Sean and I. Sean had a mastiff—big guy, rolling around with a bloodhound; and my terrier wanted to break up the fight.

After vetting one another, sniffing about and introducing ourselves via the names of our dogs, we got to talking about the work we did.

Sean is 26 and has spent the last three years as a headhunter, recruiting accountants and finance people. He tells me that it’s a great time for the few firms that are looking. They’re calling the shots; meantime, Sean’s thinking about leaving the business because volume is so depleted.

But not for applicants. Sean began telling me about this old guy (my age, actually) who’d told him that he only needed a job for the next dozen or so years. “How could I tell him he was out of luck?” Sean asked me. “You’re a psychologist— how come these guys don’t realize that there’s no work and that there will be no work for them when recovery comes?” Even now, his clients want younger people.

Sean knew what he saw. What he didn’t get was that his reluctance to tell applicants the real deal— and as a consequence, to encourage their pursuit of phantom work with the next young recruiter— served no one well. Sean felt like a liar, though he avoided having to share an unpleasant truth. And the applicant felt disappointment, but nothing like the loss he’d have to work through in order to reorganize his sense of self.

As a pair, they were joined in a game of appearance: the appearance of work-to-be-provided versus the appearance of work-desired. About as productive as the interaction of Sean’s mastiff and the blood hound.

I know Sean’s disappointed middle-aged accountants: telling themselves that they are unemployed rather than newly self-employed: because the “un” is conflated with “self”: undoing their dignity and esteem as they wait, dependent on an uncaring market to offer its wares. Its time to discover self, and the necessity to work with others, toward an entrepreneurial use of what they know.

• BROWSE / IN TIMELINE
• « The Real Stressed Bank Test
• » Making Sense of This Non-Depression

• BROWSE / IN Age Creativity Identity job seeking Learning Self-Knowledge
• « The Real Stressed Bank Test
• » Making Sense of This Non-Depression

• RELATED / YOU MIGHT FIND THESE INTERESTING
• No related posts