Recycled Boomer

by Larry Lefkowitz

Twenty months ago I wrote about starting over again (and again) in reference to employment. When I was young, I had several career plans in mind, and felt sure I would follow one of them. Maybe you can relate when I say that my career has followed none of them.

As happens so often in life, I have fallen into things and followed hunches and gut feelings and intuition. Feel free to chuckle when I tell you now that all of that landed me on the unemployment roll again for the third time in the last six years. Yet another company with which I chose to ply my trade has fallen by the wayside, joining the other two as the best places that ever employed me. By day, I am a technical writer and I rode the first wave of mass technology in the personal computer revolution. I was then on the leading edge of the convergence of television and Internet. More recently, I have been on the cusp of digital television, all with firms trying to find a niche in burgeoning industries.

Living in a section of the country not known for its technology, I have worked for a number of start-up ventures. My colleagues and I are known as start-up rats because we enjoy the adventure of extending ourselves to do whatever is necessary to succeed. These kinds of ventures have a low success rate. Those that actually succeed usually have a low mortality rate.

This is becoming familiar territory now, though I am far from comfortable here. It got me to wondering how other people our age have fared. In today's job market, there is hardly any security anymore at a job, and certainly there is no such thing as loyalty. Mostly there is pretense to family atmosphere and comradery (he said cynically), with company picnics and holiday parties and lunches and such. Then come the layoffs. The three companies I was with that went out of business fostered family atmosphere and really did seem to care about their employees, but that surely didn't save them from harsh economic realities. But back to the issue.

I am another year older now and well into middle age. I am paranoid about being employable at my age, my normal salary, and my education level. But then, I always am. While I have been fairly successful in finding employment, my feelings of vulnerability are heightened with each passing year, and my thoughts always turn to the feeling that maybe this time my luck will run out. Surely the job market is similar for many, but at our age, is it worse for us? Does the downward spiral of the quality of life begin here? I wish I knew.

What I did realize, even before this recent event, was that I am a working animal. Having a steady job, somewhere to go, something to do every day, is important to me. It is the way I am. I realized a while ago that I never really want to retire. It's not that I am not good at doing nothing; in fact, I am quite good at that. I just can't do nothing for too long.

So I am back on the bricks and observing my own fate as though I were a spectator, waiting to see how it turns out. This perspective allows me to avoid extreme worry, even if it is a tad detached. I do hope it turns out well, for me, you, and all of us.

Larry Lefkowitz lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia.
He can be reached at: ellefkowitz@yahoo.com .

Back to Living