About the Job Market
One of my co-workers was quite a busy digital tech before the crash and we were talking about how it got progressively more difficult after November ‘08 to sustain a freelance situation. She sort of wondered aloud why it was that some people worked straight through it and, in fact, are still working in the industry despite the fact that so many people, including the two of us, more or less dropped out for the time being for a less relevant (if not more stable) pursuit. I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries on the military channel lately, and it struck me that there’s something of a parallel in the randomness of it all.
“It’s kind of like war,” I said. “A lot of people get shot, but some don’t.”
Now that I’ve written that down and re-read it, I realize that it’s actually a wildly offensive claim for me to make. War is the only thing like war with Haiti coming in a not-too-distant second. Anything even approaching such an excruciating reality is unfathomable, especially given that I have a job and it’s pretty great. Not to mention that, in my case, cosmic randomness played merely a supporting role to irresponsibility when it comes to my willful (and hopefully temporary) exile from the photo scene.
But taking my own stupid situation out of it, the unemployment stakes are a bit like the trenches in the sense that there’s not necessarily a reason why one person works and another person doesn’t when they’ve both gone about things in more or less the same way.
Anyway, these are the things I think of when I spend my evenings digging though the Library of Congress online stacks with the War in Europe raging over my shoulder.