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 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.

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