What is work? Employment? A job? A career? Are they synonomous?

Whether you even think to ask these questions is probably based on whether you have survived the last decade unscathed.

I haven’t.

Exactly ten years ago today I got laid off. I have never stopped working. I have never been employed again.

There is a huge difference between the two and in that difference you will find the wellspring of modern America’s collective anxiety.

If you think America is in great shape and think critical analysis of the world of work is just whining, read no further. This essay is not for you. If you wonder, why, with the unemployment rate below 5.5%, there is still so much sullen fear undergirding American society stay with me for the next two thousand or so words.

*****

The second thing I did after being informed my position at a Boston public radio station was being eliminated (I’ll tell you the first thing in a minute) was visit the Bureau of Labor Statistics website to check out what the data said about my prospects for a return to full-time salaried employment.

It was not a pretty picture. I was in my fifties. If I did not find another position within six months - not quite a fifty percent proposition - the odds of ever having full-time salaried employment again dropped dramatically. And, if I did beat the odds and find a job inside six months, the likelihood of being re-employed at the same salary was virtually nil.

The data guided the decision: no point concentrating all my time and effort on looking for another full time position. So, while circulating my resume in the hope of beating the odds, I returned to freelancing, something I had done in my 20’s and 30’s.

I became an entrepreneur and set up my own little radio production company. Today, I work all the time. But my situation bears little positive comparison to my life when I was employed and had a regular salary and benefits. Self-employment as a choice is fine, self-employment out of necessity is not real employment.

There are millions like me - over 50, laid off, bought out, working freelance, or as “consultants.”

The odds of finding a job before basic unemployment runs out are longer now than when I got laid off; keeping a job if you are re-hired a 50-50 proposition - last hired, first fired. The likelihood of re-employment at the same salary slips with each week of joblessness.

Given those numbers, we mature unemployed don’t hang about. We start companies in a spare room in the house. No moss gathers under our feet. We are at the peak of our economic responsibilities: paying for children’s education & helping them start in life, saving for retirement, and taking care of aged, infirm parents.

We have all had years to learn the basic lesson. Work is a necessity, pure and simple, but employment is something more. Employment brings status and stability to one’s life. It is not just an economic good, it is a social good whose non-financial benefits - an affirmative sense of identity, being part of a workplace community, being financially committed to a stable society - form a positive feedback loop into the wider economy.

Somehow that simple fact has been lost on those who manage America’s enterprises. Today, we live in an era of pre-emptive downsizing.

I don’t think the core readership of Medium is my demographic. It is young, of the generation that has no expectation of “employment.” Based on the articles promoted in my daily Medium Digest e-mail, folks who will see this article are in their 20’s and early 30’s and come from the “fail often, fail fast, break shit” school of economic development.

Downsizing is a molecule in the rarefied air you breathe. In start-up land it may be a business necessity … but in the rest of the world it is not and it is worth thinking about what I am about to say: