It’s 6:00 AM on a Monday, and millions of people stare at their bathroom mirrors, dreading what will happen in the next few hours. All over the world, people will clock in at a job they hate that makes them feel dissatisfied, which has taken over so much of their personal lives that they feel empty.
Of course, it hasn’t always been this way. When we were younger, we bought into several ideas that we learned in school, that our parents taught us, and that society held as truth. If you show up and work hard, your contributions will be rewarded. In the world of our parents and those before them, that world did exist. But that world doesn’t exist anymore for many people staring at that mirror at 6:00 AM on a Monday.
The pandemic has changed the meaning of work for everyone. That’s not surprising. What is surprising is the insistence by some companies — or, better to say, the upper management of some companies — that nothing has changed despite the evidence and would like to return to the business model that suits them best. If successful, it would be one of the only times the toothpaste has been returned to the tube successfully.
For one group, the pandemic has caused more than just a redefinition of work but also a reprioritization of work related to the rest of their lives and the kind of work they’d like to be doing. So after years of working at jobs with little to no advancement, recognition, or reward, they leave those jobs, deciding to keep their talents at home and use them to benefit themselves. They are writers, photographers, podcasters, audio editors, video editors, graphic artists, etc. They are creatives. They are in their 40s and 50s. They have set a new course for themselves after half a life of doing something that didn’t fulfill their need to Be.
They are Mid-Life Creatives, and I am just one of this great talent migration, and this movement isn’t going to go away. Here’s why.
No security
One of my grandfathers worked for General Motors for decades, the other for American Airlines. My wife’s grandfather worked for Ford. It was a different time back then when a company hired you, and you had job security. Workers had rights, and there were strong unions to protect those rights.
Today, job security is an illusion. The days of working 40 years for one company for a gold watch and a pension at the end is gone. Not only that, but the world of at-will employment now means that we can arrive to work one day, and they advise us that our services are no longer needed. Not for any performance or disciplinary issues but simply because the company needs to cut its budget.
So, why continue to believe that lie and that worker protections will ever be strengthened, and unions will be reinvigorated? That job security will ever be more than an illusion?
No retirement
The previous generations had the security of Social Security and Pensions to fall back on in their retirement years. Then, in 1978, Congress established 401k plans. But unfortunately, while 401k plans offer workers the ability to save for their retirement, we have often seen how less stable they are compared to pensions over the past twenty years. That’s because 401ks are tied directly to market performance, and defined benefit plans like pensions aren’t.
The market would like to tell you that overall the performance of the market is bullish in the long term. Still, we’ve seen stories of people on the verge of retirement having their savings wiped out, as well as stories of the fees on withdrawing money — even after retirement — taking up to and over half of a retiree’s savings. The very design of 401k’s lets the gamblers play with the house money and keep as much of it as possible.
In addition, the previous generation had Social Security to add to their income in their golden years. So we all pay into this system. Still, people of my age and younger can’t expect Social Security to be there when we retire as the previous generation continues to deplete it faster than the tax base pays to keep it solvent.
So, knowing this, why continue believing in the illusion of retirement when the system won’t be there for us?
No equality
The American Dream is just as much a melting pot of ideas as America is a melting pot of people. However, the overall concept is that everyone has an opportunity to succeed. You’re promised the same shot as the person next to you. However, that’s not true for a myriad of reasons.
We live, whether we choose to admit it or not, in a classist, sexist, and racist system. A ruling class has set up this system to benefit themselves by transferring wealth to their coffers and keeping it through monetary and social policy. That same ruling class tells us that we can have a seat at the table if we follow the rules, but the rules keep changing. They also tell us that the reason we don’t already have a seat at the table is that there’s a set of people trying to take that seat away from us. So instead of fighting the ruling class, we fight that set of people. In truth, they aren’t fighting us; they’re trying to follow those same rules. The ruling class sets us against each other, and when we fight, they win.
There will never be class, gender, or income equality in our system. Despite years of happy talk about the American Dream and have equal opportunity to sit at the table, the ruling class doesn’t want that to happen. So why continue to believe the lie, and hope that the people in power will do anything about it?
Now, that’s a lot of negativity thrown at the Powers That Be. It’s harsh, and some of you may not take the same view I do. But, we can agree that whatever you believe, the pandemic has changed much about how business works.
After 18 months of the world on pause, we’ve learned a few things. First, the pandemic made us realize that:
Businesses are not families
The corporate line that “We’re a family” is hogwash. It’s time we stop believing it. We’re cogs in a piece of massive machinery, and we’re replaceable. I’ve had to learn this lesson twice.
You can work over 40 hours a week for a company habitually, have excellent performance reviews, participate in corporate activities, volunteer for corporate initiatives, be appreciated by your colleagues, and still be on the chopping block if the company decides you’re no longer needed.
There is nothing ‘family’ about that.
The Status Quo is gone
Had they made an effort to keep their human capital during the pandemic, the status quo would have been maintained. But, now that things are angling back towards normal, they would like you to forget that for the past 18 months, we still did the job. It doesn’t work for them, you see. It doesn’t work for them because this ‘family’ doesn’t trust you any farther than they can throw their server room. No, they need you back here in the office so they can ensure you’re doing the job you’ve been doing all along. That’s what works for them.
But, what works for them doesn’t necessarily work for us. This long-term experiment in telework, which many businesses swore was not feasible, became a success. Millions of people learned they don’t have to spend hours in traffic, spend thousands on daycare and gasoline, or eat the gas station sub for lunch. Many of us no longer have to punch out to go to the bathroom, to be interrogated afterward about why we’ve spent so much time being ‘unproductive’.
We choose to live
We’ve finally realized that the final element of this Information Economy that we live in is the shedding of one of the Industrial Economy’s last elements: The need to centralize. You and I get it, but business hasn’t grasped it yet. Until they do, the Great Migration will continue, and many more people like me will find something else to do because we’ve realized that we can choose to live a life where our career doesn’t suck the life out of us. We can choose to do something for ourselves if the career path we’ve been on no longer brings us joy. We can choose to live and do something that calls to us and fulfills our need to Be.
Final Thoughts
Now is the time for the work-from-home employee. The independent worker. The freelance worker. It is part of the future promised to us but never realized. It is a future we need to fight for now because, with no protections, no retirement, and no equality, the risk is the same. If that is true, then we should act in our self-interest precisely the way a business operates in theirs.
It’s our time now. Let’s embrace it.
