The future
Lately, between hopelessly submitting job applications, volunteering too much, not cleaning enough, and watching bad TV, somehow I keep finding myself reading articles about the new economy, in which adults need to be continually reinventing themselves, connecting with new people, learning new skills, switching jobs, etc. It's all so... dynamic. I am feeling the opposite of dynamic. I don't WANT to be dynamic. I don't want to have to be selling myself on twitter and tumblr and foursquare and a million things I've never heard of just to participate in society. I don't want to be continually networking. I just want a steady job that I don't hate, and that pays more than the cost of childcare.* And I want to be able to retire before I die. (Assuming that is, that I ever get a job again. I may already be retired. Mission accomplished!)
This vision of an entrepreneurial world in which everybody is nimbly working the angles and positioning themselves for the next big thing - I don't know, it sounds to me like a 20-year-old's** vision of a great place. People get damaged and set back all the time, and people are sometimes stupid and often stodgy. There has to be space for the cautious, the late adopters, the damaged, the sensitive - the rest of us. (Or maybe not!) I'm having a hard time imagining what the world is going to look like in ten years, or fifteen,***** and I'm often afraid that it's just going to run over me and/or people I love.
On the other hand, the lesson I know I should have learned by now is to take things one day at a time. It has to be enough to be alive now, to be safe and warm and (mostly) clean, to know that we are secure, to have friends and family who will back us up when we need them. The kids are very effective at bringing me back to the immediate moment, with their demands and their dramas. This morning, for example, there was a big drama about a blister. I'd like to keep things in a state where a blister can be a big drama.
*If I had guaranteed access to cheap, good childcare, I would feel a lot more entrepreneurial. (Or at least as entrepreneurial as I am capable of feeling, which honestly isn't very.) Republicans, are you listening? Give me universal single-payer healthcare and decent affordable childcare, and I promise you I'll start a business.
**Not me when I was 20, though, because even though I was oblivious, I wasn't nimble or entrepreneurial even then.
*** This also ties in to my ongoing perplexity about what skills and tools the girls need to acquire now to prepare for their adulthoods. Computer engineering? Hand-to-hand combat? Beekeeping? Robotics? Construction? Negotiation? Aeronautics? Sharpshooting? Beats the hell out of me. I am, however, almost 100% sure that it's not going to be musical theater, which is what Duchess is interested in at the moment.
This vision of an entrepreneurial world in which everybody is nimbly working the angles and positioning themselves for the next big thing - I don't know, it sounds to me like a 20-year-old's** vision of a great place. People get damaged and set back all the time, and people are sometimes stupid and often stodgy. There has to be space for the cautious, the late adopters, the damaged, the sensitive - the rest of us. (Or maybe not!) I'm having a hard time imagining what the world is going to look like in ten years, or fifteen,***** and I'm often afraid that it's just going to run over me and/or people I love.
On the other hand, the lesson I know I should have learned by now is to take things one day at a time. It has to be enough to be alive now, to be safe and warm and (mostly) clean, to know that we are secure, to have friends and family who will back us up when we need them. The kids are very effective at bringing me back to the immediate moment, with their demands and their dramas. This morning, for example, there was a big drama about a blister. I'd like to keep things in a state where a blister can be a big drama.
*If I had guaranteed access to cheap, good childcare, I would feel a lot more entrepreneurial. (Or at least as entrepreneurial as I am capable of feeling, which honestly isn't very.) Republicans, are you listening? Give me universal single-payer healthcare and decent affordable childcare, and I promise you I'll start a business.
**Not me when I was 20, though, because even though I was oblivious, I wasn't nimble or entrepreneurial even then.
*** This also ties in to my ongoing perplexity about what skills and tools the girls need to acquire now to prepare for their adulthoods. Computer engineering? Hand-to-hand combat? Beekeeping? Robotics? Construction? Negotiation? Aeronautics? Sharpshooting? Beats the hell out of me. I am, however, almost 100% sure that it's not going to be musical theater, which is what Duchess is interested in at the moment.
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