How Can We Beat The Recession?
There is ongoing recession, and I’m not referring to the one that is cyclical in nature. The recession I’m talking about is one that inevitably comes, but I don’t think it’ll leave us for quite a long time. It is the recession where we go through the loss of good factory jobs and systemic unemployment. Who is in trouble?
The people who knows that their job can be systemized or exported, yet they still continue to hold the glass-half-full mentality that they are invaluable.
We’ve been proven time and again not to underestimate the power of the Internet. It has squeezed inefficiencies out of many systems and digitize data that the industrial age has created. Factories were at the center of the industrial age. If local labour, such as building cars, crafting pottery and coming up with insurance policies, costs the industrialist more, he has to pay for it. However, he no longer need to now.
If it can be systemized, it will be.
Imagine if you’re the pressured middleman. You happen to stumble upon a cheaper source, what would you do? If the unaffiliated consumer can save a dime or two by clicking over here and over there, so can many inbetween-people too. It was the inefficiency of imperfect communication and lack of information that allowed companies to charge higher prices. With the expansion of the Internet, many of us can be easily replaceable. However, also with the expansion of the Internet, many opportunities are created as well. As long as you have a laptop and a connection to the world, you can connect with everyone. The problem?
We are connected to everyone at any given point in time.
It is faster than ever before. The speed at which innovation and inspiration comes is almost impromptu, and many of us are not used to such instantaneous stress. Somewhere along the way, many of us seem to forget that owning a phone makes us contactable, not answerable. Yes, initially we may feel guilty, be it a personal or professional call, when we take our time or don’t at all as it is always mistaken for something else we don’t really mean. However, in today’s modern society, especially in today’s modern society, we need to bear in mind that our time and attention are ours to spend and others’ are theirs too. More often than not, we would prefer it if people didn’t spend so much time fussing over whether there is a tick or two.
We own phones, not tracking chips.
I believe it is only when we step into the workforce that we truly feel the disconnect of such a recession. If we’ve been trained to do a job where someone tells us exactly what to do, it is highly likely that they can find someone cheaper than us to do it. Yet, our schools are training and churning out kids who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do. What makes the situation worse is the never-ending irrationality of the human behaviour. Fear. We say we want to be thin, but we eat too much. We say we want to be smart, but we don’t ever read anything other than school textbooks. We say we want one thing, then we do another.
We say we want to get out of the factory worker conundrum, yet we give in to the resistance.
The resistance is the voice in the back of our head telling us to back off, be careful, go slow and compromise. The resistance grows in strength as we get closer to an insight and to the truth of what we really want. The contradictions never end. The upside? We know the amygdala isn’t going away. So we also know that our job isn’t to get rid of the amygdala, but to quiet the noise and ignore it.
Let’s take a leap of faith and figure out how our interests can match what the world truly needs now. It is going to be an arduous wait if we’re solely depending on the HR people to pick us. Once we find out that there are problems out there interesting enough for us waiting to be solved, and we quickly come to terms that we already have all the tools and permission we need, we hardly wait for someone to pick us. Instead, we pick ourselves.
