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Just spent some time (when I should have been grading) going through and purging all the tumblr accounts I follow that have been inactive for a year, two, four, however many years it’s been. I do this more regularly on my twitter feed, but today the purging and the time frames really made an impression on me. I mean, how long have I been on social media? There used to be such a vibrant, thriving community of educators on tumblr. For the most part they are gone. I find what’s left of my PLC on twitter. But even there it seems that the community is shrinking, failing, disappearing, amid all the talk of teacher shortages and reforms in education. There is no shortage of teachers. There is a shortage of qualified people willing to work in education and in classrooms for poverty wages and a constant barrage of disrespect and demonization. But that’s another discussion.
Where has the time gone? I realistically am five years out from retirement, but those five years seem like forever. Looking back, however, where did the last five years go? They disappeared in a flash, a blinded haze where I simply put one foot in front of the other and marched on, being the ever good little soldier/teacher/mother. Without noticing the passage of time, the closing of doors, the monotony of existing in this time and place. Maybe it’s the brutalization of teaching as a profession and education in general. Maybe it’s the increasing danger facing us in our political, social, and economic realities as institutions come under attack and threaten to collapse under the weight of it all. Oligarchy, authoritarianism, marginalization for large segments of society are terrifying things. Our political reality is a shitshow on fire. Watching the slow moving massacre occur, trying to ride the wave of change and make decisions that will not cost you everything is exhausting. There is no time for everything that needs to be nurtured, reflected on. There is no time even to barely achieve anything beyond basic existence.
Even fandom offers little of the joy and solace it has in the past for me. I haven’t written fic, or anything non-profession related, in over a decade. I may have forgotten how. Fandom seems as fragmented and fragile and tribal as every other area of life. I am tired and looking at a stack of grading to be done as I sit here commiserating with myself, which is not a good look for me right now. I eat, I shop, I work, and it all seems a bit empty, going through the motions. I’m so grateful for my kids and my friends and my cat and my occasional travel, which is what is making all the continuing on possible. The road ahead is a blurry mess, and I wish I could do a better job at reading the signs, but it is what it is.
For now I guess I’ll just sink back into my funk and watch the cat cleaning himself. And maybe try to get a little scoring done.
Where has the time gone? I realistically am five years out from retirement, but those five years seem like forever. Looking back, however, where did the last five years go? They disappeared in a flash, a blinded haze where I simply put one foot in front of the other and marched on, being the ever good little soldier/teacher/mother. Without noticing the passage of time, the closing of doors, the monotony of existing in this time and place. Maybe it’s the brutalization of teaching as a profession and education in general. Maybe it’s the increasing danger facing us in our political, social, and economic realities as institutions come under attack and threaten to collapse under the weight of it all. Oligarchy, authoritarianism, marginalization for large segments of society are terrifying things. Our political reality is a shitshow on fire. Watching the slow moving massacre occur, trying to ride the wave of change and make decisions that will not cost you everything is exhausting. There is no time for everything that needs to be nurtured, reflected on. There is no time even to barely achieve anything beyond basic existence.
Even fandom offers little of the joy and solace it has in the past for me. I haven’t written fic, or anything non-profession related, in over a decade. I may have forgotten how. Fandom seems as fragmented and fragile and tribal as every other area of life. I am tired and looking at a stack of grading to be done as I sit here commiserating with myself, which is not a good look for me right now. I eat, I shop, I work, and it all seems a bit empty, going through the motions. I’m so grateful for my kids and my friends and my cat and my occasional travel, which is what is making all the continuing on possible. The road ahead is a blurry mess, and I wish I could do a better job at reading the signs, but it is what it is.
For now I guess I’ll just sink back into my funk and watch the cat cleaning himself. And maybe try to get a little scoring done.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-16 05:31 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2019-02-16 05:42 pm (UTC)From:tired
Date: 2019-02-16 06:28 pm (UTC)From:But we don't have a lot of control over work and often all our energy is gone before we even get home at the end of the day. I'm frustrated by the current work culture that expects you to be busy 100% of the time. If a single person is seen to be slacking off, management takes that as a sign that they can make do with fewer employees. But you can't work people at maximum efficiency for a full shift every single day without burning people out. And there are always those busy spells where you don't have nearly enough staff even if it looked quiet ten minutes earlier when the boss walked through. (Every year I end up going to work sick because there is no slack in the schedule for anyone to take time off even if you know you are contagious.)
Life should not be a miserable slog counting the days until retirement.
Re: tired
Date: 2019-02-16 06:45 pm (UTC)From:Workers are more productive now, profits higher, wages stagnant, benefits hit or miss at best and still it seems to be not enough to satisfy the insane drive for more and bigger profits. People break. They get sick. Their children get sick. People go hungry and homeless even with minimum wage jobs. And it still seems to be not enough. Work harder. Work longer. Work until you’re 70. Unless you were born lucky and don’t have to do any of that.
And you are so right about life not being a miserable slog just counting the days until retirement. True words. And I cannot for the life of me remember when exactly it turned in to exactly that.
absence of hope
Date: 2019-02-16 07:39 pm (UTC)From:But even though my finances were worse when I was younger, it feels worse now and I think the difference is hope. When I was younger and I got whiney, people would reassure me that I still had my whole life ahead of me and that I had plenty of time to find my true calling or whatever. And now no one is trying to reassure me that it will all magically fall into place a few years down the line.
Also back when I made the decision to give up on university, it was still considered relatively normal to have an Associates Degree and work experience because Bachelors Degrees were more for those taking an academic/professional path. Now even entry-level jobs list Bachelors Degrees among the requirements. If I can get away with just submitting a resume, I've got a lifetime of work experience, but so many places make you fill out those online forms where you can't avoid answering the questions about education and I get automatically dismissed. There are so few jobs and so many applicants that they can afford to make you jump through hoop after hoop just to apply. If I were to lose my current job, I have no idea what I'd do because I'm literally "unqualified" for most employment now.
I feel like the work shortage is artificial. Yes, many jobs have gone overseas. Yes, many jobs have been automated. But the thing that infuriates me is that we could probably double the number of jobs if employers would just hire enough people so everyone isn't overworked and stressed out.
You call somewhere and you're put on hold forever because they don't have enough people covering the phones. You go to the store and you wait in a long line because only half the cash registers are staffed and there's only one person over 21 running from lane to lane to handle the alcohol sales. Even if I had paid sick days (which I don't), I can't call in sick because then my coworkers would be understaffed. The boss only schedules people to work as few hours as possible, so we have extra people only during peak hours which means the low-ranking employees (the new people who need extra training) are commuting to work for only 2-1/2 hours of work and at a time when I'm too busy to help train them (which sucks on multiple levels). I walked into an ice cream shop one evening and there was no one behind the counter because it turned out only a single employee was scheduled to work during off-peak hours and he had to run to the bathroom.
Twenty years ago I remember having the kind of job where you could just sit there and drink a cup of coffee and play solitaire while waiting for the phone to ring. Like you didn't make a big show of goofing off and you made sure you kept up with your work, but your boss knew you weren't busy 100% of the time and that you were being paid mainly to be available when the phone did ring or a customer did walk in the door, because sometimes it would go from dead quiet to every phone ringing at once and that's just how it is. They didn't think up new tasks to give you because you dared look like you weren't doing something for five minutes or cut people's hours because they decided they only need one person to close or eliminate positions entirely because you can multitask.
Just… hire enough people so that everyone can take a few days off from time to time without it being a scheduling crisis when someone needs to take their kid to the dentist. Hire enough people so that there's time to think about the job at hand instead of constantly scrambling from crisis to crisis. The human brain needs downtime occasionally even at work if you want people to be doing their best job.
Re: absence of hope
Date: 2019-02-16 09:28 pm (UTC)From:The better job myth is ridiculous. We all want to drive through and get our burgers and we all want customer service. We think those jobs are necessary but we don’t want to pay people a living wage to do them? We want them to show up sick and spreading germs on our food or on our kids in day care because we don’t want to indulge their need for sick days? What the fuck is wrong with that picture?
The dignity of labor is not really diminished by type of job.
Imagine a society where everyone is a doctor or lawyer, but no one is a garbage man. How long do you think that society will function so that the doctors and lawyers can rake in the bucks and feel superior to the garbage men? We all have talents, skills and things to contribute. I don’t care what kind of specialist you are as a doctor, when your car breaks down, when your pipes burst, when you need a new roof, you don’t call another doctor.
And yes, you are very right when you say that even though your finances were worse when you were younger, it feels worse now and the difference is hope. My kids are in their 30s, which means they still have time but the bulk of my working life is behind me. And should I get fired or laid off for whatever reason, the odds of me ever finding another job are slim and none. Now there is no reassurance that everything will all magically fall into place and be all right.
It is true the work shortage is artificial. Yes, many jobs have gone overseas. Yes, many jobs have been automated. But we could probably double the number of jobs if employers would just hire enough people so everyone isn't overworked and stressed out. This is indeed part of the problem. The other part is that the jobs the economy is now generating are not on par with the jobs that have been eliminated or outsourced or offshored. The gig economy does not guarantee enough hours at any given time to feel comfortable about being able to pay your bills. Getting sick or injured can bankrupt anyone.
What is truly sick is that these problems are flaws in the system or bugs but are instead features of end stage or hyper or vulture capitalism. Only a few can win. Everyone else needs to lose. History has multiple versions of the same story when we get to that point whether we are looking at the French Revolution or the unrest in Haiti today. Coupled with the loss of hope is a very real sense of fear and danger.
Re: absence of hope
Date: 2019-02-16 10:13 pm (UTC)From:There's an old gag in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker series about the alien society that sends all the "useless" people like telephone sanitizers away and then the society is wiped out by a virus contracted from unhygienic telephones.
We always need people to do the "unimportant" jobs that actually are important even if people don't think about them much.
For a while, I lived in a county in California that had a severe shortage of affordable housing. (My boss and my landlord were the same person, which is an uncomfortable amount of control for another person to have over your life.) And despite occasional talk about the issue, every attempt to build new affordable apartments was struck down. People claimed that building more apartments would encourage poor criminals to move into the area. But it had reached the point where unless you were an older established person or a teenager still living at home, you couldn't afford to live there. (The skew in ages was dramatic.) And it was so obvious in the level of service in the local restaurants because they were all (under)staffed by inexperienced teenagers. I have never experienced slower customer service as when I lived in that town. The cause and effect was so obvious. Individually, people would complain about it when their own kids moved away because they couldn't afford to live there, but collectively, they still didn't want to build apartments and risk dirty poor people moving to town.
(In a big city you can get away with it because workers will commute in from poorer neighborhoods, but this place was kind of out in the middle of nowhere.)
The root point is that all human beings should be recognized as having some value beyond their bank account, but we literally judge human worth by financial worth and it's so offensive on an almost spiritual level.
Re: absence of hope
Date: 2019-02-16 10:35 pm (UTC)From:In cities today gentrification of neighborhoods accomplishes the same thing. It kicks the old residents out who are usually less wealthy to bring in upper middle class residents (at a minimum). Lower and middle class residents are then left on their own to find affordable housing which usually doesn’t exist.
And yes, all human beings have worth not tied to their jobs or economic status.
As more jobs are outsourced or as more workers are replaced by robots or self-serve checkout lines, Universal Basic Income will become a much bigger issue. Without jobs provided by the economy, large numbers of people will not be able to provide the most basic of needs for themselves and they won’t be able to buy all those things Amazon and Microsoft et.al sells again bringing the economy to a staggering halt.
Amazon is valued at one trillion dollars and made over eleven billion in profit last year, yet they will pay zero dollars in federal income tax, and in fact will get a huge refund. The same for Facebook which provides absolutely no value to society. Taxes are not class warfare. Severed heads on pikes for tax avoidance resulting in grievous harm to the body politic is class warfare.