Walking my dog earlier this week, I was reflecting on new words that attempt to capture a strange world that colleagues and clients describe everyday. It hits us directly, but is strangely at arms’ length. We read about it on blog posts, in the papers, on tv; but it is vaguely “out there”— without the direct face-to-face impact of conventional trauma. We have to think about it to link it to our dread, sleeplessness, and worry about plunging bank accounts used to pay the rent: its concrete implications for our lives, but without immediate connection to its antecedant conditions (like the cognitive disconnect between the 2 joys of conception and birth).

Then a fellow dog walker greeted me, his daschund greeting my terrier. He shook his head and said, “its a fundamental structural change.”

Yes, Dog walkers describing a new world. My friend is legitimately retired (old school: defined benefits and all) from a lifetime career path. His head scratching that morning was prompted by the inflationary spike in the price of gold after Australia raised its interest rate. His parting words? ” We’re becoming Japan: the dollar and Aussie in the carry trade”.

I continued on, wondering when this kind of talk had become comprehensible to me.

Talking with people still reeling from job loss, I have a profound sense of professionals’ dislocation. It takes time to consolidate a picture of that “fundamental structural change” my friend mentioned. I’m beginning to see descriptors of it in the management and psychology literature: beyond downsizing and outsourcing, and flexibility, there is now casualization (I like that: think of stone washed jeans rather than suits, if it were not for the Lunesta necessary to sleep at night); and my favorite— which comes from European arts communities: “precarization”. Precarization is new-speak for a social process that makes living feel increasingly precarious as we move from career professionals to a contingent workforce: armies of middle aged casualized dog walkers, chatting over coffee about the hours spent networking virtually rather than virtuously, attempting to massage contacts into something real— as if furiously rubbing Alladin’s lamp. Stories about insurance that doesn’t pay for lab tests or physicals; and we’re getting older.

Precarization. Yesterday, we didn’t have words for it. We couldn’t even think it.

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