Life, Work & Wonder

Tag: change

  • Reflecting On My Job Search

    I’ve always been a bit of a prima donna when it comes to jobs.

    Not that I want everything at a job. Or treated like a superstar at my job. But that I just have certain things I don’t want from a job.

    I don’t want jobs that start too early. Or have a windowless office. Or require me to do something I don’t have an aptitude for.

    I don’t like jobs that have too much process. Or have ebb and flow where it’s boring sometimes and hectic others, with zero control of my schedule. Or sit in a Bullpen with a lot to do but where people are distracting me. And I hate “locked” jobs where I have to work in an office 8 to 5 every day with no flexibility to my days or schedule minus pre-determined vacation time.

    I’d love to say this is new. That’s it’s my age. But it’s not. I’ve always been this way.

    Time was I really thought I hated working. But it turned out that I hated working hourly jobs with time requirements and where I was a drone.

    I learned when I went into teaching and into sales that I’m actually an incredibly hard worker. And very determined and quite good. When I’m given flexibility and freedom to do what I think needs to be done.

    I went into real estate. And like it. But it isn’t paying the bills. I need to pad this income. So am looking at supplemental jobs. And am driving myself crazy in the process because so many jobs are either micromanagement hell (one has two syncs per day to keep the manager updated on what we’ve been doing) or have fixed schedules in an office that are 40 hours per week.

    Here is to continuing my search. And not giving in to a job that will make me unhappy. Because I’m 58. I’ve done more than my share of jobs that make me unhappy. And life is just too short, especially at age 58.

  • An Ode To Boomers. We Can Actually Learn Something From Boomers.

    An Ode To Boomers

    I read a scary article this morning. The Colorado River — a major water source for 7 states that include major agricultural areas — is drying up at its source. After increasingly warm and dry years, including last year when there was virtually no snow, the creeks that feed the Colorado River are running dry, and some major reservoirs are at 25% with no snow in the mountains this year to replenish them over the hot summer.

    There will be people of course who deny it’s climate change. But I believe it takes a lot of denial to maintain that the huge spike in population (the Earth’s population has doubled in my lifetime) along with the related increase in carbon emissions isn’t having an impact. And it’s just scary as heck to think about because to me it increases the risk of worldwine famine, recession and war. I remember back in the early 2000s all the scary news articles that were coming out about the devastating effects of climate change we’d see by 2050. And now we are nearly there. Which means it will be accelerating now decellearating and we’re just getting started. In other words, buckle in.

    How much I loved the movie “Don’t Look Up.” Because it’s actually really about climate change according to the maker, about how we call can see the devastating effects approaching (in the movie’s case an asteroid) but no one is really doing anything about it (except to financially capitalize on it) and the government is denying it’s a problem.

    All of us, including me, are guilty of not doing anything about it other than fretting about it or posting about it or maybe trying our best to individually not AI (like that will save anything). I think this is largely because we don’t know how to do anything about it.

    Which is why I want to give some credit to the Baby Boomer generation.

    In the 1960s we have Vietnam. And other issues. And there were protests, and more protests, and sit ins, and more sit ins, and songs and songs and songs. And more protests. And it took 10 years. And lots of pain and even some deaths. But change finally started to happen.

    So the Boomers actually figured out how to make change. And did it.

    So I want to give kudos to them. And to say we all could learn something from them. And maybe we should take some lessons from them and rise up and demand some changes that may save our environment. Not posting about them (like I’m doing here). But actually doing something about them.

    So here are to the Boomers. That take a lot of flack from us younger generations. But they also deserve some credit. And we should learn something from them about making real change before it’s too late.

  • AutoPay and Digital Music Are The Greatest Inventions In My Lifetime :)

    The most important invention in your lifetime is…

    The world has changed so much in my lifetime.

    When I was born, we’d never been to the moon. It’s possible it was all a hoax and we still haven’t been to the moon, but let’s assume that it’s real and we indeed have been to the moon. That was the year after I was born. Pretty amazing. In my lifetime, so much has changed, of course. There are too many inventions and changes to even begin listing since we all know what those are. But, for me, the greatest inventions have been autopay and digital music.

    How much I hated paying bills before the 2000s. How much drudgery it was. There were checks to write, stamps to buy so I could send in those checks, reconciliation at the end of the month to make sure everything was accurate. Then for every day spending there was so much speculation how much cash I might need, then persistent worry I might lose or miscalculate the cash. Now it all — everything — just goes on my Visa which I can then peruse in a few minutes at the end of the month, challenge quickly online with Visa if something seems amiss, and then pay with the click of a button. Every expense imaginable goes on that credit card, and it has just made everything so much easier to deal with!

    And then there’s music.

    How much time did I waste in my life making mixed tapes. Or rewinding cassettes. Or cleaning records. How much money I spent for albums that overall I didn’t like very much but had two songs I liked. And how many times did I have to listen to a song over and over and over again on the radio until the point a song that I might have once liked became absolutely intolerable to listen to, not to mention all the ads in-between songs. But with digital on-demand music, every song I could possibly imagine is right there for free.

    The world has changed so much. Many of these have been bad, some of these have been good, and there’s no doubt it has changed the world so very much in 50 short years.

    But my favorite changes are on-demand music and auto pay. They’ve made my life so much easier and more enjoyable — every single day.