It's the end of the work as we knew it ...
... and a lot of us don't feel fine. We never anticipated this weird limbo between "peak earning potential" and full-on retirement, but Gen X is crafty enough to figure it out.
Welp. Another week, another wave of emotions more volatile than Newsmax’s stock price. The DOGE-bag is still sowing despair with feckless cruelty, but it’s fun to watch X users pile on after he couldn’t buy Wisconsin’s Supreme Court. And it was especially satisfying to watch Cory Booker’s amazing and long-overdue filibuster—especially since it outlasted Strom Thurmond’s daylong screed against The Civil Rights Act.
Closer to home, though, we’ve been thinking a lot about the Gen X Career Meltdown and the alarming number of 50somethings whose professions are no longer a thing, like “we were making candlesticks when electricity came in.” It’s bad enough when Bill Gates predicts that AI will replace humans “for most things” in the next 10 years. So how are we supposed to feel as an obsolete subset of a (nearly) obsolete species?
So many of us have endured core-level changes to our hearts and our missions since this recrudescence, and our clients have different needs, too. It doesn't serve anyone, least of all ourselves, to pretend everything's the same as it was three months ago and assume business as usual. Everything's more precarious now, with much higher stakes. How do we adjust to that?
While we sort out our professional futures, we can confirm that concentrating on community and face-to-face interaction still pays a lot of dividends. Last night, Magda began teaching “What Do The Gospels Actually Say?,” a class that analyzes the Sarah Ruden translation of the four Gospels. The first session covered Ruden's introduction and how odd and problematic the Gospels are, even in structure, as core texts for a religion. Which inspired an interesting discussion about collective truth and a universal distrust of Evangelical pastors.
Meanwhile, Doug has been working communications with the
and hosting the Wheelie Good Podcast. The most recent episode is with an avid long-distance cyclist (like, Alaska-to-Key West long) whose brother was killed on his bike by a distracted driver. Throughout that talk, he kept thinking about how the interview below make him feel more fluent in the language of grief and condolence:
We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us in order to engineer the soft landing that we always thought retirement would be. So while the kakistocracy announces "Liberation Day" (which is essentially “liberating” us from our economic senses), our own liberation comes from encouraging new projects like Geezer Creative, which remind us how crafty and resourceful our generation can be when we need to.