Dive into the archives.
- Disappointed Expectations: The Obstacle of “No Guarantee”
Reading about the history of retirement as a life-stage in the industrialized world, I realized that the expectations held by most of us, born after the Second World War, were “givens” or “truths” that were incredibly new as social phenomena. In fact, funded retirement from work-life only emerged in the mid 19th century, modeled on [...]
- On Pessimism, Beckett, and Optimism
Reading Beckett, reading Beckett’s reading of Proust, reading the intellectual regress back to Schopenhauer and Kant, I put down the books. I stop. It comes down to this in human affairs: we know that on the way to dying, we live and experience. Obviously, not only good times, but the odd “peak” experiences, fade: sometimes [...]
- DayTrading & Managing Our Own Minds
Increasingly, clients have described their turn to trading in volatile and uncertain markets, as their corporate incomes have vanished and their assessments of possible return to their former workforce positions have darkened. Day trading. Paradoxically, they have embraced uncertainty as their former sense of loyalty to firm and task has been disappointed. Their “security”, they [...]
- Happy Days R Here Again
Clearly, I was misinformed. I grew up on stories of the Great Depression: was formed by my parents’ memories of sufferings endured or imagined. My great-grandfather… who’d weathered the Russo-Japanese War and had cannily utilized his war-record after the Kishiniev Pogroms to purchase property formerly proscribed to Jews— just so he could embed his young [...]
- Green Shoots of Knowledge
Something looked terribly familiar about the article by Gillian Tett in the Financial Times. It nagged at me for a day until I checked back in my blog archives and found that I’d been thinking along the same lines— that the models we use to understand our business world seem to be broken. That means [...]
- Speaking Prose All Along…..
There’s that old story about the fella who discovers that he’s been speaking prose his entire life. That’s what I thought, suddenly, listening to the recently self-employed gentleman, despairing of his recent downsizing. I call him self-employed, though he would not yet admit it: because he’s now on his own. He’s smarting because the conditions [...]
- Family Business: Opportunity Lost in a Daughter’s Recognition of Dad’s Grumpiness
“Gosh, you’re grumpy today,” I heard, as I parked the car. It hadn’t been addressed to me, but to the man in the car beside me, by his adolescent daughter. Though not feeling particularly grumpy myself, her comment got me thinking. Everyone experiences moods. Some, more frequently and more intensely than others. Everyone experiences moments [...]
- The Ghost of a Former Family Business
Business developments expand and contract in harmony with economic developments. From this vantage, the current recession might be likened not so much to the Great Depression, but to more generalized periods of economic contraction. Yet, just as the ghost of the Great Depression has become a media favorite with which all of us must now [...]
- Them were Us, Yesterday: Not Coping With Recession’s Realities
Long ago, in another era, I worked as a volunteer following the 9/11 attacks. I began my work serving on a telephone information bank, manned by mental health workers, for the purpose of identifying 9/11 survivors. Working there, I noted an increasing kind of desperation. For example, on that first night (9/12), one of our [...]
- Outflanking the Recession Avalanche: Fighting Depression
Like most of us, I’ve become a newspaper junkie: whether paper or on-line, luxuriating in the onrush of information as markets fluctuate and both corporations and nation-states tremble in the shadow of Moody’s. It’s a pleasure akin to visiting the dental hygienist: the discrete pain of acceptable bloodletting. But then, I have to be in [...]
