Dive into the archives.
- Lack of demand and the destruction of self-esteem
Just having finished my earlier post, “Psycho-Economic Depression“, I came upon this by Fritz Schumacher, from “Small is Beautiful” (pages 203-204). It seemed to fit: If the nature of change is such that nothing is left for the fathers to teach their sons, or for the sons to accept from their fathers, family life [...]
- June 2011: Depleted in America
It is lonely in America. Sometimes, of course, our loneliness is stuffed full of self-satisfaction; but it often plummets in depletion to despair and confusion. These too are lonely states. From Reisman’s “The Lonely Crowd” to Lasch’s “Culture of Narcissism”, a trajectory of social development was begun with two recent contributions weighing in from the [...]
- Career Anxieties
This is how she remembered what her husband had said: ” Your preoccupation with work is destroying this family. We can’t take how wretched you’ve become.” And as she told it, she’d successfully kept her underlying depression at bay for years. But 18 months of unemployment— which were the busiest months of her life as [...]
- A New Transition: Rethinking Career
“It is exhausting?” (Yes it is) “Is it necessary?” (Yes it is) “I’ve never worked harder in my life” (Probably true) “Is there a “There” there?” (Barring unforeseen circumstances, of course…) Questions and answers between clients and psychologist: reporting back on the work necessary to create the successful transition between “what was” before unemployment, underemployment, [...]
- New Research: “The Anguish of Unemployment” and Midlife Professionals
Just released: a new study called , “The Anguish of Unemployment” from the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University confirms what we’ve been saying all along: Midlife professionals represent about one-third of the unemployed workforce • 32% of the currently unemployed workforce is over 45 years old, evenly divided between men [...]
- 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 [...]
- From Unemployed to Self-Employed
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 [...]
- Retirement Tsunami
Those of us who have worked in organizations know that as individuals leave their roles in departments, or on committees, vital knowledge is often lost. 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 [...]
- The CEC: Stacking the Middle-Aged Deck To Failure
The developmental effect of the “Current Economic Climate” upon the under-employed middle aged worker, is to force the normative later-life crisis of generativity vs stagnation before its time. 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 [...]
- Organizational Coaching for Individuals During Unemployment
The dialogs between the blog writer and the reader begin in the blog post’s generalization and develop according to increasingly particular themes. These are initially signaled by the reader/respondent who brings them to the essayist’s attention. They are then elaborated through successive pairings of letter and response between correspondents. Thinking about this process along the [...]
