Two moments, several hours apart, gave me plenty to think about. The first happened, as three neighbors, all returning from walking our dogs in the park , paused on a street corner, to wait for the traffic light to change. We were chatting about friends and colleagues who’d recently become unemployed. A well-dressed, middle-aged man, standing nearby as he waited for a bus, joined the discussion (the prerogative of New York street life): “Yeah, its weird,” he told us matter-of-factly, “I have a job but I don’t get paid. I was at the office working til 2AM last night—- the security guards smiled and said, ‘you’re lucky you’re still employed’- boy were they wrong! but how could they know? I’m a lawyer, working harder now than I did when I was being paid; but what can I do: my firm says that if and when the revenue comes, there will be some for me. Grin and bear it?”

It was an awkward moment. He was off to unpaid work, and had just shared a personal and painful experience, as if it were a minor addition to our casual, overly public, but tragically serious, talk. It really did fit, in an awkward way. Nobody knew what to say when it was done. We wished each other well, though, as the light changed and the bus approached.

Later, at a meeting with a number of HR and outplacement professionals, I remembered the awkwardness of that moment. We were developing a plan for working with job seekers— and the atmosphere in the room was  beginning to feel somewhat grim —- when there was a sudden, enthusiastic burst of energy. Two of the HR people began to chirp about the virtues of rewriting resumes- even after we’d discussed the growing number of job applicants who’d given up their quest after tens and hundreds of their applications had gone unanswered. As if the despair were not sufficiently palpable, a third offered (the cinematic close up would be gauzy, poetic…) that the transitions necessitated by layoffs permitted the unemployed to “follow their bliss”.

The contrast between this manic denial of reality and its former plausibility (perhaps just six months back, when choice while employed permitted the fantasy of a planned transition; and when the security of income permitted the risk of radical change…..) seemed both charmingly naïve and ludicrous. I thought of the unpaid lawyer at the corner, and the impossibility of the HR professionals’ current worlds — with plenty of person-power and nowhere to place them—– and recognized that everyone was driving on empty: both lawyer and HR/outplacement workers were trying to locate themselves meaningfully in a new world, without familiar bearings; even at the expense of radically distorting human despair and economic reality.

None of us could wrap our minds around the magnitude of the thing. So we talked about the “new normal”, and defended against our dread by following our bliss.

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