Those who may have been following my blog over on my NaBloPoMo page may have noticed that, aside from a humorous post on the first of the month, I have been studiously avoiding the month's announced theme, which is "Tomorrow."
This has not been by accident. Because of the uncertainty introduced into my life by the job situation, the subject of "tomorrow" is a bit fraught for me right now. To be sure, as the blog post I just linked to details, I have been planning for the immediate tomorrows like a mofo--and some of those plans are getting underway quite nicely. But there are still the larger, more high-falutin' existential dimensions to this current situation and its bearing on long-term tomorrows that are really giving me pause.
I had long suspected that there were major flaws in the rules handed to me by my parents and by society for achieving success and security. The rules being: get a good education, get a good job, develop a career, save and be frugal, invest in a house, and you'll have a secure life and an easy retirement. I've now lived through several economic downturns (the 1970s oil crisis that had people waiting in line to buy rationed gas; the fading of the "Massachusetts High Tech Miracle" in the late 1980s; the infamous dot-com bust in the late 1990s) and each of these has made me question those rules all the more. And now along comes this massive downturn, as the bursting of the housing bubble takes down the whole economic house of cards built upon it. And a lot of people who did their damnedest to follow those rules my parents tried to instill in me are now having the injury of financial hardship compounded by the insult that they did everything "right"--and still got stung.
Me, I was only middling at following those rules--did get the good education; kept changing the career so much that the nest egg is kinda puny at best; owned a condo for all of two years before I ran out of reasons for doing so, and sold it. And, well, I guess I've gotten stung too.
Let's leave aside for the moment the economic inevitability of cyclical booms and busts in a capitalist economy in which investors are always driven to game the system for profit regardless of any unintended consequences ... because for one thing, while this statement marks me as obviously cynical about the capitalist system and its ability to provide the greatest good for the greatest number, I confess that I'm even less enthused about any other extant real-world economic systems I've seen in action. So ... given that I'm stuck with living in this system, for better or worse, and given that I've seen that neither planning or failing to plan, neither following nor ignoring the rules, guarantee any kind of long-term practical security, what in blue blazes does one do?
I guess the only never-fail always-works strategy is to keep oneself ever ready to adapt oneself to new situations ... because whether you're ready or not, they're going to come at you. Hell, there could be an earthquake or a wildfire or a flood, or a catastrophic illness--god/ess forbid them all, but crap does happen--and whoosh there goes your nestegg. Hell, there's a growing environmental crisis bearing down on us that our species is still only just barely beginning to grapple with, that could make all this tsuris look like a garden party in comparison.
In the end, while it certainly helps to make certain pragmatic preparations for tomorrow, in the end the best preparations one can make are preparations on the inside: readying one's body, heart, mind, and soul to respond to changing situations, and to reach out to other people to cooperate and share. Without that essential preparation, all the rest is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
P.S. The subject line is, of course, the title of one of the more remarkable songs ever recorded by the Beatles. This incongruously silly video version is courtesy of the equally silly--and delightful--Beatles cartoon series that ran on US TV when I was a kid.
