Thoughts on Job-Skipping

I look at my parents and I look at our generation and I wonder how things are different. My parents have financial stability. Some of my friends seem to have it too. They seem to. They have a set career path in a stable industry and they look like they're going to have their jobs for a very long time. And frankly, they don't seem unhappy about it either. I envy them sometimes.

Then there're my other friends who seem to be drifting from job to job. They don't really build much from one job to the next, but seem to move from island to island. It's less certain and much more volatile. They won't have pensions and probably won't have retirement accounts either.

I sometimes wonder whether this is the new model for living...just trying to get what we can in a world that sees employees as products rather than people. It's sad to say, but it's hard to deny. People are treated as tools that fulfill a certain job. There's still some camaraderie, sure, but it's not like a family or an army unit. In those groups people rescue one another. They did things together and built deep relationships and loyalties. You would stick up for your fellow troops. Now things are different. It's not easy to build strong loyalties in an atmosphere that encourages dispensing people in the name of efficiency and other bullshit values that should never trump basic humanity.

I don't think we can change the system. We can just change how we would do things if we were in power.