[Jim walks outside at the end of the day and sees Pam] I’m coming back the wrong way. It’s not because of you. I don’t like graphic design. That’s it. Stop smiling! I really didn’t like it. It’s just, designing logos and stuff, and I miss Scranton. But it is not because I missed you. I just really wanted to come home. And, I know you said to come home the right way but, you can’t tell me what to do. Got it?

Pam says she’s wrong, but she’s actually got it right. Not all of us are defined by the jobs and careers that we have. Some of us value time with our family above all else. It’s all a choice that you have to make about what’s important to you. Pam realized that life isn’t just about her dreams of becoming a graphic designer – Scranton was part of her life too.

How often do we come to a crossroads where we have to pick between a passion and the people we love in our life? Hopefully, it doesn’t happen too often because it’s a really hard choice.

I don’t know that Pam made the right decision, but she’ll never know, right? She’ll never see the alternative reality where she’s a graphic designer. That’s the way these kinds of choices are – there’s no looking back. In the end though, it doesn’t matter to Pam because she came back to the people and the family that she loves, and now she’s happy.

Photo courtesy of Refracted Moments

Reality

These are hard times. Optimistic projections predict a rebound in the economy by the end of 2009. Pessimistic ones predict the self destruction of the United States. Lovely, right? The bad predictions wouldn’t be so scary if they weren’t supplemented with statistics showing a drastic rise in gun and ammunition sales. What are people thinking? Are people planning to threaten their way into a job with something like: “Give me a job or I’ll shoot you”? Weird.

For most of us, a wage earning job is our primary source of income. We never give much thought to it because it puts food on the table, puts clothes over our backs, and sends our kids to school. Why should we question financial stability?

Truth is, even qualified people are getting laid off. And we’ve learned that not only is the unemployment rate scarily high, but the overall sense of job security is ridiculously low. Loyal employees are terrified of the companies where they’ve devoted years of service. For those of you that select a career solely for the purpose of job stability, your most fundamental reason for working has been violently uprooted. It is now time to ask yourself: why do you work where you work?

Three Lessons from an Unemployed Man

A good friend of mine recently quit his job as a programmer. His parents and friends – myself included – thought this was a terrible idea. We told him, “at the very least, make sure you have something lined up so when you quit this job, so you can begin work right away.” He didn’t listen. He quit his job, and we all thought he was an idiot.

But is he an idiot? No. I learned a couple lessons from his willingness to quit.

First, he saved a lot of money over the past few years. Instead of living beyond his means, he lived within his means and put the rest of his money into a savings account. As a result, he knew that he could last a long time (over a year) without a source of income. How many of us can say that we can last over a year with no income? Not many. I read some survey that said most Americans can’t go more than 2 months without pay. Considering how rough the job market is, that’s plain scary. It means that even a short term disruption in work can drastically change your life.

So lesson 1 : Don’t live beyond your means and save money so you can go for a while without a job.

Additionally, he’s frugal. He buys stuff that he needs from pawn shops and looks for good deals when he can. If he can’t find a good price on something, he just waits. He doesn’t cave in and buy it, he waits until he can get it for a good deal, or he decides that it’s not something he needs.

Consumers today take a different, more expensive approach. We want everything to be new, and when we want something, we want it NOW. This approach is perfectly fine if you’re a millionaire, but for normal folks concerned about their jobs, it’s silly. It whittles away at your savings and makes you more and more reliant on the fact that you need a job.

A great example is the iPod. I ride a bus to school everyday, and I’m always surprised by how many people have iPods. Everyone has one. It’s a great device, but it’s strange that the iPods I see are always the newest model. As new models come out, people are constantly upgrading. Maybe the old ones are breaking, but if they are, we need to rethink the habit of buying this $200 toy every year, especially if you have concerns about job security.

If I want something, I usually do some comparison shopping online at http://pricegrabber.com or I check for a deal at http://slickdeals.net. Often, I can save quite a lot of money by doing some quick research at these sites.

Sure, everyone needs a job because everyone needs to make money, but in a time of economic uncertainty, the more we reduce our dependency on money, the better.

Lesson 2 : Buy things cheaply or don’t decide that you don’t need them. (I know this is really a variation on “don’t live beyond your means,” but we’re talking about money here, so I’m just trying to hammer home the point that the less we depend on money, the more independently we can live from economic turbulance)

So why did my friend quit his day job? He was miserable. He could see the next 5 years of his life, and he wasn’t happy with that vision. He was ready for something else.

In the quote at the top of this post, Jobs says that getting fired was the best thing that happened to him. You’re probably thinking “well, that’s Steve Jobs, not Joe Blow from down the street.” But I can’t help but wonder if more Steve Jobses are out there. And maybe the only reason that they’re not coming forward is because they’re tied to a safe and secure job that they’re too afraid to live without.

Living without a job gives you some freedom to decide what you really want to do, and it also makes you fully vested in your pursuits. That is, if you try something new, you’re going to give it 110% because you know that all your eggs are in one basket. If you had a job at the same time, you’d probably take a more half-assed approach.

I won’t know the outcome for my friend for several years, but he’s reassessed his life and decided that something is missing that cannot be fulfilled by his current job. I can’t say that I would do the same thing in his shoes, but I respect that he didn’t like where his life was headed and did something about it.

Lesson 3 : Figure out what’s really important to you in a job and go after it with all your heart.

We need to admit that many of us take a job because it’s safe and secure, not because it’s really what we want to do with our lives. But we’re at a point in time where with many jobs, safety and security are rare perks, not expectations. Since job stability is at an all-time low, maybe we should re-evaluate our criteria in looking for a job. Maybe we should even explore creative ways to exploit our skills to make money outside the context of a 9-to-5 job. It is our skills that make us useful and valuable, not the fact that we show up every day at 9am.

A lousy job market is depressing. We are scared because foreclosure and drastic changes in our lives inch closer to us every day. Daily costs like groceries, gas, rent, mortgage payments, health insurance, and dental care are becoming financial poison. It’s getting harder and harder to sustain our standard of living. This just means that we need to (quickly) reconfigure our way of living to make ourselves more adaptable to a volatile economy. Because if you don’t swim, you’re going to sink.

Our current recession is all over the news. Some argue that we may never recover from this recession. Houses have been foreclosed and people are losing jobs at an alarming rate. Even Microsoft, one of the iconic companies of the Information Age, announced a slew of cuts that will leave highly talented individuals without a job. It’s a bit sobering to think that job security is a thing of the past. With the exception of, maybe, doctors, everyone fears that their jobs are in danger.

One thing that I worry about is actually the people who don’t lose a job or a home – those that don’t have to change their spending habits at all. What will happen to their perception of hardship and recession? It’s possible that their view of a recession will involve no pain at all. While there are groups of people with much bigger concerns right now, such as the unemployed, I can’t help but worry that even the unscathed will lose something in this recession. They will lose the ability to empathize with those that endured real hardship through this difficult time. And in the face of future hardship, we group of us will have learned nothing from past mistakes.

There will be those of us that went through hell, and those of us that thought we went through hell.