With single departures, we find that certain problem dimensions are not addressed. My colleague Angela, for example, paid particular attention to economic trends in the staffing of R&D departments. With her downsizing, our work-group’s scope of information was diminished.

With multiple departures, vast knowledge assets may disappear.

Re-reading Studs Terkel’s WORKING, I was reminded of Haverford President John R. Coleman’s experiences of demoralization, when, in his early 50’s, he was fired as he sought work in the guise of an unemployed man. Boomers may remember the story, featured in multiple articles, in 1973. Coleman was the coalmine’s canary in what, over the next 35 years, would develop from a problem of the unskilled to a crisis among the highly educated, professional worker.

However, who was paying attention? A generation’s inattention to a problem of little import to them at the time, served the same informational function as organizational downsizing: critical information, functionally useful as a KNOWLEDGE ASSET— to think through and address a problem—was lost.

Perhaps as youngsters, Boomers caught the article, but in our drive towards maturity, who paid attention, until the demographics were devastating and PERSONAL: for the unemployed individual over 50, it takes one out of two applicants ONE YEAR to find a job in non-recessionary times. If you are over 55, it takes one out of two work applicants TWO YEARS.

At the same time, given the average American level of retirement savings of approximately $30,000 post-Lehman, it is imperative that workers remain employed at career-level income through their late 70’s.

The yawning social crisis heralded by Coleman, a generation ago is this: there is a huge income gap between downsizing in one’s early 50’s and the necessity to work without retirement through one’s late 70’s. We cannot go softly into that good night. Still, with our attention on the present economic nightmare, who wants to begin factoring the problem to come? Especially, both generationally and as a function of organizational delight in short-term planning, if it doesn’t deliver an immediate impact on: YOU.

The multiple projects we’re working on at Accord’s StoneSoup begin to address the problem. Still, foundation funding remains tight, government funding is dedicated to bailout and the immediacy of recession, unemployed individuals have difficulty in self-payment: and we’re bound head-long into a socio-economic tsunami. Its not just health insurance that’s the problem: try to hold onto that day job!

Partly obscured within the spiraling numbers of unemployed workers of all ages, is the high incidence of professional knowledge workers, freed through the economic imperatives of corporate fiscal panic to pursue other interests.

Unfortunately, the shock of the real is what most encounter, as carefully crafted cover letters and resume submissions multiply; with the dawning recognition, often in deep emotional distress, that conventional job-seeking has become ineffective.

My clinical and consulting experiences suggest that this realization heralds a period of turmoil, involving the pragmatic reassessment of personal/familial finance as well as a new-found faith in social networking.

Among the more positive outcomes of this experience, is the recognition that work needs to be reconceptualized not as a singular career, but as a mosaic of projects-in-development, which must be consistently cultivated and curated.

However unpleasant the process, it has become the new “normal”; and occasions two significant psychosocial developments.

The first is the emergence of a new entrepreneurial class, composed of formerly reluctant workers. Entrepreneurship alone becomes the avenue for economic survival under the Recession’s hastening of a downsizing trend already notable at the beginning of the millennium.

The second is a shift from the 20th Century norm of career employment followed by retirement. The challenge, however, is the same transitional period that once hounded retirees contemplating their future (what will I do? How will I keep busy? I have no/many hobbies, etc) now confronts the middle-aged worker a decade or so earlier, compounding the shock of being “between jobs” which means being between something and nothing. The conflict hits just as the individual struggles between what psychoanalyst Erik Erikson understands as generativity and stagnation, leading to the consolidation of life’s activities either in success or in despair.

The emergent societal crisis challenges the individual to consolidate everything she knows and has learned. The imperative is toward generativity; though the socio-economic effect of unemployment may compound one’s developmental sense of stagnation. Resolution of this conflict of is real and has life/death economic consequences. It is about both meaning and earnings; and presents a serious test, late in life, of further consolidating one’s personal identity.