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.

The crisis itself is to be expected– worked through across the years in contemplation of one’s lifetime of accomplishments and failures. But the additional external pressures of massive layoffs and diminished retirement savings, with minimal governmental guarantees of funding for later life’s requirements, shift the world of work such that former certainties of career and retirement are nostalgic memories.

For the worker always anticipating consistent employment, the transition to under-employment is a shock. Not only does it throw off the personal and familial strategies developed over a lifetime, but it also presents the individual(s) effected with an imperative: do nothing or find something to do.

The finding of something to do is critical, and possible — retirees have found something to do for a long time (golf, volunteer work, Walmart….)— but never under the kind of pressure experienced by today’s middle aged— with kids in school, parents requiring their aid, and 30 more productive years— to continue working at a career-level income.
Psychologically, one’s timing is thrown off. The traumatic losses of salary and the social world of the workplace stack the developmental deck against a sense of fulfillment and generativity, toward a sense of stagnation and failure.

What becomes lost is a pride in the knowledge-based skills that have sustained one’s professionalism. Paradoxically, survival itself emerges as a singular strength. It assures the individual not only of adaptive competence, but of intelligent use of cumulative life skills—a positive and healthy outcome.

Yet for the less adaptive, less capable of grieving significant loss to self-esteem and professional identity, the environmental effect of the “CEC” may be to precipitate a new version of an identity crisis. Unlike the crisis of earlier life, imbued with post-adolescent strength, despite considerable ambivalence, the forcing of the generativity crisis, with its very center the question of capability and adaptation over the life-course, biases the individual in the direction of loss: if only because of the effects of work loss on the individual and family, both economic and interpersonal.