There comes a day when that hollow, sinking feeling happens whenever the body is not moving at any quiet time at work. A suspicion arises that it’s the truth: you have come to the end of the road at work. It is a wall and not a door; an impasse. An inner voice stage whispers in agreement, “This is as high as you go in this job”.You look up, down, right, and left and fully acknowledge that you are at a dead end. Days at work are joyless and dry because it’s “The same thing over and over again.” Do you remember in the movie, “Ground Hog Day” that the main character, Phil Connors kept reliving the same day and making the same choices over and over again? Move on. Nothing to see here. The road goes nowhere and the only way to grow is to go. If the situation feels like a scene in “Groundhog Day” this month. Good. Make your move. Plan your escape. It’s still early enough in the year to begin “the search for employment with growing room 2.0”. Tap the link to read about seeing this moment as an opportunity through the eyes of Heron Wolf.
This beautiful life moment is brought to you by Jason Leung from Unsplash
Some seniors “un-retire” or hang around in the workforce longer for reasons other than a warm, satisfied feeling that comes from believing the work contributes to the economy, the family, or well-being.
They simply hate looking in an empty refrigerator. Anything will do. They’re there for the cake.
Passion and Ambition
Some people work for passion–the excitement of being in a fulfilling position or a location that just happens to make money too. Cool. Passion is wonderful when a worker is in the springtime of life when youth and strength are on your side. Passion causes more people to come into the world. Ambition plus passion is a fire. Ambition and fire are good as long as they are well-managed. Again, much like a fire dies without constant fueling, passion also dies without attention. Age, habit, and boredom, chills passion. Maintaining such voracious energy over decades is not humanly possible or sustainable.
Stability
Some people work for stability–a reliable paycheck that pays the mortgage and builds the”ladder” that allows the “higher and better” trajectory at work. Sometimes stability fails. shutdowns, layoffs, and closings play havoc on careers clinging to stability. Everything depends upon what rung of the proverbial “career ladder” a worker occupies whether the top, the middle, or the bottom. Stability held up by fear of loss might become a golden cage where there is neither ambition, passion nor satisfaction. It’s just a job. It could be worse. It could also be a dead-end job; a terminal point in a career where there is nowhere else to expand or develop. “The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh…” In this case, is “the car knows the way to get to the place” where that dependable, expected, predictable outcome is. It is how we sometimes treat the company holiday event: we just show up for the cake–and it had better be good cake.
Purpose
Last of all, some people work for a purpose. Many seniors discover themselves here on the map of a career. It is not only the money. It is doing work that will change things and people for the better. Some workers get that good fortune earlier in their work lives, but far too many do not. Seeking purposeful work may be enough wind to re-ignite the fire of ambition and passion. These are a few lessons I have learned over a lifetime in the workforce: Success takes more than talent: a Michelin level chef may not be the best restauranteur. Success takes more than passion: passion ebbs and flows like water–sometimes Niagra Falls; sometimes like a trickle going down the drain. Fellow career traveler, may it not be that you’re working for the money alone–showing up at the party for the cake. There is also a spiritual spin. Check this Greg Ayers take on the subject
Purpose becomes cloudy without clarity, but when allowed to return to the road it can make heat enough to bake even better cakes.
In a few hours, we will be looking over our shoulders at 2023. As the year passes into inaccessible history where we can do nothing but remember it, we do not bid a fond farewell. Let’s just say goodbye.
The year facing us is an opportunity.
Since it will be a presidential election year, we will have the opportunity to do justice and right.
Since it will be a leap year, we will have the opportunity to scale walls and jump barriers of all kinds.
Since it will be full of surprises, we will have the opportunity to decide the best response to them.
It will be a year to revive hope, rediscover purpose, and say to life, “I double dog dare you!”.
My eyes are weary. My ears tire of this and when I get tired, I speak out.
Woke. Suddenly this word is everywhere even in law, but what does “woke” mean?
Is it another 4-letter curse word?
Is it a verbal threat?
Why does political conservatives’ use of this word evoke so much fear?
Let me clarify things now.
In the community where I grew up–Brambleton, then the predominantly black neighborhood leaning against downtown Norfolk, Virginia–the word “woke” meant the opposite of “sleep”. Here’s the way it is properly used:
Chile, is you woke? My mother used to holler this up the stairs at 6:45 am on a school day.
Translation: Child, are you awake yet? Roll your bum out of bed, take a bath, and come eat your breakfast so you can get to school on time!
If you’s not “woke” you’s “sleep”.
Translation: If you are not “awake” you are “asleep”. Therefore, anyone who wants to use my home neighborhood word must use it correctly to mean totally aware, conscious, wide awake, not able to be fooled, not in the darkness, able to understand, and seeing clearly.
There is a Florida law today with “woke” in its title. Here “W.O.K.E.” is an acronym for “Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees”, so there are people running around saying they are “anti-woke”.
I call this cultural co-opting. This practice happens a lot in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Here is the online dictionary Merriam-Webster meaning for co-opt: (N/noun) “the act or an instance of co-opting … a taking over or appropriation of something for a new or different purpose“
“Woke” is heard everywhere lately as in “this is a ‘woke’ show”. Used this way, my neighborhood word is being taken out of its original meaning and context. It becomes a mean, derogatory, divisive term directed by one group against any other group whose way of life or ideas are judged to be unacceptable, or despicable. Some cleverly use this word with full knowledge that its misappropriation will incite negative emotional responses. Some hearers of this negative message may call themselves “anti-woke”. Reminder: propaganda machines use these same methods. Wake up, people.
Are these folk truly against knowledge, ignorant, in the dark, sleepwalking through life?
Where I come from that behavior is being “sleep”; unconscious, unwilling to face the light of day, unwilling to accept the facts, complicit with propagating lies.
When we adopt words, symbols, clothing, or anything else from somewhere else–as we in the USA are wont to do–we have to be careful of the message wearing, saying, or using those things convey. This, friends, is being
By now we have stopped laughing about “Anna Claws” and we’re all settled into seriousness about the future of workplace design. Let us go from the silly to the sane. Are we all agreeing that the future workplace may not be homogeneous downtown offices? Good, because from where I sit it looks like a hybrid work environment is in the mix of where we work in the future.
Oh my goodness! Hold your piss and vinegar won’t you please Big Corporation!?
Tear out a page from all the independent insurance agents, podcasters, authors, and freelancers like me. There are standards laid down by the US Government and municipal zoning and land use laws that apply to spaces used as home offices. If the IRS can be that serious about office space in the home so can the rest of us.
Working from home can be made more comfortable and efficient. It is not complicated. It is simple. First of all: space. Of course, you know I am not talking about the upper layers of the atmosphere above the earth, but a little square footage in the house. In the century-old Victorian where my family lived before “the great retirement downsizing”, the back upstairs bedroom was my studio/office. When we moved to Maryland, My husband used the room off the basement kitchen as his office, I used the living/dining area as my studio/office, and my budding dramaturge daughter used the small bedroom as her office. We were enthralled with life.
Then, we became “empty nesters” and we were forced to readjust for the life season.
Life after “the great post-retirement downsizing” became difficult because spaces designed for housing elders tend to be much smaller. People who want to continue brain-nourishing hobbies like gardening, and arts and crafts are simply not planned for. Everybody does not go fishing or take up golf. The art room where people build things with sticks and glue is not a studio.
In short, WFH can save lives and support the mental health of the workforce. Planning and a few taps of the keys to Amazon can fix the “bad chairs and tables” issues in home office design. The workforce can regain valuable skilled workers if WFM is thought of as a real part of the economy instead of a shame, a sham, or a suspicious activity.
You’ve got to have seen this by now. It’s all over the internet. That 3D image of what future WFH (Work From Home) employees will devolve into? Hit the link! Hit the link! Go to the bathroom first because I guarantee you will laugh until you spritz.
The image seen at the beginning of this blog is a photo taken of attendees at a Comic Con in San Diego, California in costumes resembling the villainous technology/human hybrids, the Borg, from the movie Star Trek: First Contact. (Yeah. It’s my little dig at AI hysteria) They are portraying the Borg queen and a few members of her hive/collective.
What?! Do you think that brilliant piece of mythology about what the Work From Home workforce will devolve into is any different from the Sci-fi fictional world of Captain Kirk and Captain Picard?
I think not.
It has become quite common for us Americans to be so heavily reliant on technology nowadays to the point where they feel like an extension of our senses and communication. It’s not uncommon to bring our phones with us to the toilet. There are AA-style support groups for tech dependence like that. The first time I saw somebody using a blue tooth device it shocked me because he looked like he was talking into the air. We talk to our watches like Dick Tracy from the funny papers. We wear our tech in and on our bodies more and more. More aids, appendages, and enhancements are either in existence or in development. We are becoming Borg.
The COVID-19 pandemic drove companies into survival mode. Companies reconfigured their workforce for safety and poof! Several supporting technologies sprung up like Borg appendages to serve that extra-office/in-office hybrid. Before the worldwide health threat who ever heard about Zoom other than highly sophisticated larger companies until the need for decentralized electronic communication became widely necessary? Suddenly everybody had to have knowledge of Zoom on their resumes. It even changed our vocabulary. The company’s product name, Zoom has been verb-ized as in “Do you Zoom?”
I dubbed her “Anna Claws” because of the permanently claw-like hands the image projects that people will allegedly develop from excessively holding a cellphone. The furniture company that dreamed up “Anna” is basically saying that since personal homes are not equipped to serve as satellite offices the human beings who work from home will over time devolve into the “claw-handed cave dweller” in the dystopian image.
I personally balk at several things in the image. First of all “Anna Claws” is female. Do we get the point that WFM might most benefit folk I call the “Summertime Family”? This is the family that is in the stage of life where there are children still at home. Companies love these workers’ energy and drive, but not so much that these highly productive 25-45 year-olds are always fighting the battle to be both good parents and productive employees simultaneously. Most of the time the average company’s setup is no help and works best when one parent–usually female–supports the other parent from home.
The second thing I balk at about Anna Claws is she is an older female. Her hooded red eyes, jowled face, bent spine, and sagging bosom look too much like the features of the crone; the witch that society fears and loathes. There she sits like a lump parked in the middle of her rumpled bed bent over her laptop, sallow-skinned, overweight, and bloated from lack of sunlight and exercise. Her work outfit is sweatpants and a sleeveless tee-shirt. It screams to women especially “Go back to the office or you’ll lose your fashion sense, youth, and beauty!” In other words, “The office makes you attractive”. Are not high energy and youthfulness what companies love in new hires usually found in “Summertime people” but not in alleged slower-paced, mature employees in the Later Stages of Their Careers?
Here it is wrapped up in alleged concern for the health of the workforce–something from a furniture company–the ultimate company propaganda: Go back to working in the office because chairs in the office are nifty unlike the ones around the kitchen table (where the kids do their homework) that will make you ugly, old looking and unfashionable.
I’m writing this blog from my kitchen table. I laugh.
The boom generation is retiring and buying burial insurance. Somebody calls my home every day and into the dinner hour without fail about senior benefits or burial insurance. How then, can I escape the odd thought about how the passing of my generation–the boom generation–will influence American society? Tap the link above and look at some general ideas from the funeral industry about rethinking farewell rituals.
What will losing a parent/grandparent mean to Generation X? It is a predictable passage of life, after all. It’s inevitable and more in-your-face now because of the COVID-19 pandemic that has unexpectedly sheared off too many of the great-grandparent generation. Every 4th of July surviving WW2 vets dwindle to numbers countable on one hand.
How will we as a society handle so many grieving families? Where on earth or under the earth do we bury them? Will burial space be rationed?
Is how we are handling chronic illness and the chronically ill just or humane?
Are Millennials preparing to take all the abundant vacant spaces at work at the management layer or will middle management become extinct as a hybrid workforce replaces the last vestiges of the old workplace hierarchy?
Do we have to be concerned in a future world with fewer workers about AI assuming some jobs? Is the business world thinking and planning for a world with a combination of humans and non-humans working side by side?
Listen to a boomer sendoff: ‘This is Dedicated” by The Mamas and The Papas.
can you identify the work-in-progress mess? UFP mousepad. mouse. apple-shaped stuff box. paperclip dispenser. stapler. last year’s datebook. This year’s datebook. computer power cord. Piles of stuff to be filed. What used to be the dining room table.snack bowl that used to be a take-out dish. Photo by Edia using her Android phone
This is my reality.
This is my workspace. It’s between the back of the sofa and the kitchen island.
Many thoughts are whizzing by on the subject of mindfulness these days. Working from home has been hard on many in the workforce who demanded hard boundaries between workspace and family space–usually a distance measured in miles. however, I am noticing another concept coming to the game: “mindful mess”.
I gotta drop this one squarely on the doorstep of the last three years of COVID-19.
People are nesting in chaos.
Not the string theory or the physical science theory, people are letting the mess be. I moved last July if you remember, and the mess was astronomical with boxes piled halfway to the ceiling.
If you visited me at the old address In September of any year you would see what I call my “artistic chaos” that usually starts after the 4th of July and wraps up by All Hallows Eve. During “the making season” I would always be somewhere in the middle of holiday art projects and covered in glitter. While working on my book, the dining table-cum-work desk was covered with a perma-frost of paper. My lap was the actual workspace. My spouse and I managed to eat dinner somewhere…
Today there are no more boxes (whew!) and the work-at-home space has settled down to a humming-along working mess now with two remote workers in residence. It is the eve of a creative season preceding a re-issue of a book. What happened to good old American neatness? What about a messy desk=a messy mind?
Do we now celebrate the reality that being human on earth is messy? Look at my workspace. I certainly do.
It goes without saying that many things in the workplace and in life generally have morphed into something no generation has ever seen before. The plague of the century, the dastardly disease COVID-19 has had its effect everywhere. As we move with cautious steps into the year of the water rabbit I have noticed certain things about the “new normal” that I cannot pass by without comment.
Customer Service is one of them.
What on earth is happening to customer service? I am well aware that many jobs– especially on the low end of the pay scale –have become totally automated in response to businesses’ inability or choice to not staff certain positions with live humans. Even I have gotten used to not seeing real cashiers and breezing through the self-service checkout at the grocery store.
There must be more opportunities for voice actors somehow. So many times my first contact with a business is an automated voice on the customer service line asking me to click 1,2, or 3 to get something done. What I want seldom gets done and to add insult to injury, I get kicked back to the beginning. Around and around and around.
I call any government service state or federal to deal with an employment issue. Pick your choice. The agency I want assistance from goes by a name that can be confused with another agency’s name that has a totally different function. I wash breakfast dishes while waiting to speak to an “agent” who refers me to another number where I will wait until it’s time to do dinner dishes.
I have worked in customer service-client happiness-CSR or whatever retail floor sales positions have been renamed these days for over one-quarter of a century and come to this conclusion: there is no substitute for real live human contact.
Victoree's INDUSTRIAL MYTHOLOGY 