10.13.2002
I Call It Recessionitis...
Maybe I shouldn't say this affects all of my friends. Maybe I shouldn't characterize most of the Fairies this way. However, so many of them are so irritable these days! Moreover, it can't all be me. I think it's recession rage.
Like its similarly aggressive cousin, road rage, recession rage manifests itself in situations where smooth social interaction is key to accomplishment. It's the irritability in my friends' voices. They can't seem to talk on the phone for long, the way we used to. They snap at their children more. There's a persistent tension to them, an undercurrent that is ill concealed from the surface. Their existing relationships seem to be going OK, but they snipe at each other. When we're all in social situations, they drink more than before. I don't recall it ever being so much as it is now. There's a feeling that floats in the background, an unnamed anxiety that everyone feels and no one acknowledges.
I think a large part of this is that we don't have the job mobility that we did before. Sure, us Fairies have jobs, and generally, we're making as much as we ever did before. Some of us even more than we did before. Nevertheless, there aren't as many jobs out there as there used to be. Now, if we lose one, we can get another. However, we take the first available, and minimize the dickering. Moreover, we have to keep whatever job we get, even if we don't like it, for as long as we can, in an effort to ride out this economic downturn. It used to be, if it got too bad with a job, it was easy enough to find another, give notice, and leave. But now most of us feel trapped. Some have been in their jobs since before the recession hit. Now they've got golden handcuffs. Where they might have used this as leverage with another employer to sweeten the deal, nowadays, there isn't that other employer at all. Or if there is, they know they don't have to negotiate. There's a lot of on the job stress. Difficult bosses or coworkers aren't likely to leave for greener pastures. Therefore, your negotiating and political skills have to be at their best all the time. This takes much more energy than we are all used to expending. This contributes to the tiredness, the irritability, the search for release. It's gotten so bad that some of my friends don't even want to take vacations. They're not so much scared to lose their jobs as they are reluctant to relax on the vacation and then experience the huge wave of pressure descend on them again once they return to the workplace. So, they opt not to go.
Some of my friends feel trapped by high payments. During the boom times, they bought cars or other high-end items. Now, they are in a position where they don't have a large cash reserve in case their jobs go away, or they have to keep their current jobs no matter how unpleasant things have become because otherwise they'd get their autos repossessed. Some of them have previous bad credit or bankruptcies, and worked their way out debt slowly and painfully during the boom times. However, they were able to do so. Now they are walking a fine line between keeping on top of things and being one set of paychecks away from the house of cards tumbling down.
Even if the economic boom times return, I'll have the same attitude then that I did during the last boom. I never trusted it. I always felt the other shoe was just about to drop, and I paid down as much debt as I could with whatever bonuses and layoff money came my way. The job market may improve, but the cycle is inexorable, and another downturn will come again.
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