Career transitions of a certain age
Looking back is looking forward.
Part 15 in this series.
There’s a social media genre in *professional advice* circles with which my algorithm has made me very familiar.
“Are you Gen X?” a very late-stage Xer asks, looking into the camera from a curated seat in his curated home office. “Were you recently laid off? Has it hit you yet that you probably won’t ever be hired again?”
Ah, the hyperbole of doomerism and end times theology, rebranded as career advice.
Follow me for what you MUST do next, but only after you accept your professional obsolescence.
Buy (into) my plan for what post-corporate success looks like, but only after you accept your current circumstances as yet another form of proof that GenX will always be afflicted of their invisibility and the disrespect it creates.
Listen to me and not the other social media grifters of the moment, but only after you accept that I’m the one who found my way out of the job market matrix.
Look, I know the circumstances make buying this line of thinking more palatable. The market sucks. Aging sucks. Corporations and their incessant drive to funnel the largest share of profits into the smallest number of hands is one of the root evils of American culture, and that sucks.
Being thrust into unemployment in this moment—particularly for the first time—is a hell of an incentive to feel all these things and more. To embrace a bitterness and alienation. The job search process alone is enough to drive all this home.
But I return to the place empathy and an awareness of anyone other than myself provides me.
Young job seekers are watching aspirational jobs evaporate, leaving fewer, increasingly worse options.
College graduates are terrified because they followed the prescribed path to middle class access, only to have the door slammed shut just as they were set to walk through it.
Mid-career folks are frozen in positions they should have advanced out of because the people above them are clinging to their roles in the system.
And the oldest workers are not leaving, making that bottleneck even more pronounced.
I could be describing 2025. Or 2009. Or 2001. Or 1988. Or 1974…
Employment and financial stability are check engine lights, not generational markers. They tell us when the most exploitative elements of our system are at their worst. Just look at the advice the wealthiest among us are giving.
A buyers’ market is coming. This is a once in a lifetime chance to build wealth. Now’s the time to invest.
This benefits everyone, they tell people in rooms almost none of us are allowed into, even as most of us will simply hope to keep the jobs we have or find replacements for the ones their market has taken from us.
Will we be able to do this? Not all of us, and not if something doesn’t change.
But I’m fairly certain hucksters using age-bait to drag eyes onto their content so they can pay their own bills via the flagging hopes of the people sucked in by their *insights* will do less than nothing to drive the change we need.