The Good Times
After two years of living with the Covid pandemic, I look back at what has happened and to where I am now. As a post-World War II baby boomer, I grew up into an economy that was strong and expanding. My father and mother, both tried and tested in the Great Depression and WWII were strong and resourceful. Through very hard work they acquired a house, cars, children and grew a good life right in the middle class, and then passed on the privileges and opportunities of their life to their offspring. I was able to go to college, the first in the history of my family to do so. I was able to get jobs and grow my own life in the middle class, marrying, having a child, a house and all of the other trappings of the good life.
Even during the great technological revolution that started in the mid-80s and up to the new century, I was able to re-educate myself and make the jump to become a tech-savvy worker, able to adapt to new ways of working and become very productive, the kind of worker that every company needed at the time. But, with the turn of the century, the cracks began to appear in the good life that everyone wanted. The technological advances began to outstrip the workers and they began to fall by the wayside. The economy had started to shrink and companies sought other ways to use tech to replace workers and maximize profits. During the economic shock of 2008 I managed to keep learning and continue to work, but by the beginning of 2014, like many other companies, the internet made my occupation much less necessary and I lost my full-time job along with many others in my profession. The tech that had kept me employed, had discarded me.
This time, my long experience and abilities were no help, Ageism was by now, completely entrenched in modern working society. While I was fully qualified and even tech-competent, my age was a barrier to further full-time work, and I had to go down the path of self-employment. I managed to continue and even somewhat thrive in the last eight years. But, of course, I didn’t count on the arrival of Covid-19. Everything in our society has been turned upside down and survival is the theme of the day. Fortunately my wife is still fully employed, for the time being, but she is contemplating retirement and withdrawing from the workforce, we all get old.
With Covid, many other occupations still face threats to their ability to operate, and it is hard to see which ones will continue and which ones will fall by the wayside. The good times are officially over and I have long since settled down to a period of waiting for the pandemic to end. Which of course it will not. It is going to be with us in some form for a long time to come, even as everyone is trying to pretend that it no longer exists. As always, the key to carrying on is the ability to adapt and change. Things are no longer easy, if they ever were. Like the rest of the world, I will have to make my way as best I can with what I have.
(Here is a photo of my father after WWII with his first car, he worked hard to acquire a good life for himself and his family. No time in history was ever easy for anyone and that is just how it always has been, and perhaps always will be.)
