Positive Thinking
It's not enough
Forced myself to go see a psychologist because it seemed like I had a lot to unpack. The guy tells me I am very negative and tend to engage in “catastrophizing.” Is that even a word? My dictionary is underlining it in red but I’m too lazy to go look it up. I accept that I have a negative worldview. I have written in past installments about my dark side energy—I’m quite consistent in that regard. Being told I’m negative is still better than being told I have Asperger’s, which is what I was bracing for. See? It wasn’t that bad! Either I don’t have Asperger’s or he hasn’t picked up on it yet. The therapist tells me that I should say my frustrations out loud and then set them aside. Then I should say positive things and think positively. I read that book by Norman Vincent Peale sometime back in the ‘80s. Maybe I should re-read it. I’d have to buy a new copy, ugh.
Strategies that don’t work
Positive thinking will only get you so far. It’s a necessary condition for success, but by itself, positive thinking is not success. My psychologist is right, though. I’m not putting energy and effort towards making anything happen. I have resources, but I’m too risk averse. The reason I was never an entrepreneur is because I had too much to lose if I failed. The cost of failure needs to be lowered for me somehow. I need to bet with “house money” because I won’t get a government bailout if I fail. I started following the Powerball website, but I have prostrated myself into buying any tickets yet because I majored in Computer Science and Mathematics and the courses of probability were eye-opening. I view playing the lottery as the last vestige of scoundrels. I haven’t fallen all the way there yet, but it’s probably coming.
Job Market
Anyone reading this who is unemployed needs to think hard about survival strategies. The job market is not going to bounce back. I know I’m probably never going to work as a software engineer or in any technology role ever again. It hurts to know that. I wasn’t finished, but the ride stopped regardless of what I wanted. That realization is not as hurtful as the one that keeps me awake at night: The one where my daughter, currently a junior in college, can’t find work in her chosen field.
The article relates how the job market is behaving (or not) for recent college graduates. It’s pretty ugly out there. Where did all the jobs go? Nobody knows! When will the market improve? Nobody knows!
Before you say “kids should do a STEM career,” it would be helpful if you would read the above linked CNBC article because it clearly shows that STEM grads are all sitting on their hands. People in my former field truly believe that AI can replace all the entry level tech workers. That begs the question: Without a pipeline of capable workers, how long would it be before the entire field stalls out for lack of skilled employees? After all, junior developers become senior developers in 5-6 years’ time. It already seems like there’s going to be a “Cash for Clunkers” type of situation here where there won’t be anyone capable of fulfilling future needed roles in companies. I guess companies are banking on overseas workers filling that gap? I truly don’t know what the plan is anymore.
My daughter is studying Graphic Arts as a major. She also has a minor in Japanese, a language in which she is remarkably fluent in both speaking and writing. She added a “certificate” in Entrepreneurship and Business Marketing to that. She claims she will graduate on time. She also applied for a part-time role doing graphic design at her school but hasn’t heard back. Ghosted—by her own university.
Internships are vanishingly difficult to obtain these days. On the “positive thinking” side, my daughter has a wide range of creative skills now, perhaps one of those can germinate into something like a career if enough effort is applied. It may be only a question of finding the right locale. Will she make a lot of money? Let’s stay positive.
I told her when I dropped her off at school as a Freshman that finding work in the Arts, or let’s say, in creative type work (because she’s not going to be painter or sculptor, but perhaps a graphic designer) is that you have to be highly motivated and self starting. It’s not like nursing where a body has a perfectly clear and obvious path through school and into emptying bed pans and handing out meds. My daughter’s part-time job is at a dog day care type of place. Her role there is to play with dogs and shovel poop out of dog crates, so kind of similar in a way and that was without any kind of college degree.
My daughter also had a summer job this past summer that was creative. It didn’t pay a lot, but she worked for a local city operating the “Puppet Wagon” which is a traveling puppet show trailer featuring hand puppets. The city paid her to write the scripts and perform the shows. She and two colleagues performed over 100 shows this past summer to the delight of youthful (and not so youthful) audiences. They only got rained out once. It was definitely the kind of opportunity that doesn’t come along very often. Most high school and college youths get jobs at Culver’s or Fleet Farm, or maybe mowing a golf course. My daughter got to be a local celebrity because she was the master of ceremonies out in front of the wagon with a microphone and also played several of the puppet characters during the shows.
The Positive Action Step
What has to happen for my daughter, and probably myself, too, is that we will need to become better at entrepreneurship. There’s the positive approach. The future of success is not getting some role in a corporation, it is becoming the corporation yourself. That’s risky, but so is “sitting in my parents’ house on LinkedIn 24 hours a day” as Georgetown graduate, Ms. Christina Salvadore, mentions doing in the article. LinkedIn is total brain rot. I should design a better solution than that garbage site.