...and 10 Surprisingly Good Things about Being Unemployed

Better than a knife in the back   

One of my sisters-in-law thought my last post was depressing. She felt bad for me, immersed as I am in self-perpetuating misery. I thought the post was hilarious, although I did point out to a commiserating commenter that, while misery makes excellent blog fodder, it's still freaking misery. Once again, apparently, I have missed the humor mark.

In the interest of balance, I thought it would be a good idea to address the positive aspects of losing one's job. The fact is not everything about losing your job sucks. It won't be rosy by any stretch of the imagination, but there are a few pleasant surprises along the way.

1. You can now finish a library book before it comes due.
2. You won't overflow the hard drive on your DVR with recorded shows and movies that you don't have time to watch.
3. No paycheck you sold your soul for is ever quite as satisfying as a severance check when you know you were offered up to appease the capricious gods of commerce.
4. Your daily exposure to fools, charlatans, pirates, and thieves is at an all-time low.
5. You have an automatic and very effective response for solicitors and telemarketers. “I lost my job” shuts them up almost every time. I say almost because you are still going to have to deal with the religious whack jobs who want to pray with you.
6. If you were thinking about a career change while you were still working, you now have time to realize your ambition. Just because it didn't happen the way you envisioned it doesn't mean it's not an opportunity. A word of caution though—there are already a bazillion people out here trying to monetize social interaction by blogging, tweeting, and booking their faces. There may not be any barriers to entry, but it's a bitch to get noticed.
7. You can bond with your pets in ways you never dreamed possible. All your dogs and cats and whatever elses are firmly in your camp when you're home all the time. They will be connected to your hip or ankle. This may seem an annoyance at first, but you will soon realize that your pets are an improvement over the jerk-wads at work. A cold nose up the butt is way better than being stabbed in the back by an ambitious co-worker with a self-serving agenda.
8. All the self-improvement plans you neglected when you were working are now within reach. You used to be too tired to go to the gym when you came home from your ball-busting job. Now you can go in the morning when the poor schmucks who are still working for your old employer are just stumbling into their first mind-numbing meeting of the day. You can read the books on your list instead of hundreds of e-mails from management wanting you to explain why the company is not meeting sales targets without telling them that their targets were set to satisfy unrealistic directors rather than being based in any objective, quantifiable data. The smartest manager you ever met could not have written a mediocre novel, and even vampire romance is better than the last business memo you had to read.
9. No more buzzwords. No more jargon. No more obfuscated business-speak. If you are a big fan of jargon, doubletalk, and ambiguity, you can get your fill by reading the congressional testimony of Goldman Sachs executives regarding their actions during the recent financial turmoil and alleged Great Recession.
10. So long as you can keep your blood pressure under control, there is a lot of entertainment value to be had in following the rants of ignoramuses who still believe, variously, that: the sub-prime mortgage crisis was caused by dead-beat borrowers who failed to honor their obligations because they are bereft of any moral backbone, that anyone drawing unemployment compensation benefits ought to suck it up and just get a job, that Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner are heroic civil servants who saved us from financial ruin at the eleventh hour, that George W. Busch tanked the economy by military adventuring in Iraq and Afghanistan, that Barack Obama is spending our future to further his own political aspirations, that Lady Gaga is stylish and talented, that the Real Housewives are either real or interesting, that Charlie Sheen is winning, or that Anthony Weiner is less reprehensible than, say, Mark Sanford or Arnold Schwarzenegger because he didn't actually reach out and touch anybody. Really, the number of things with the capacity to amuse us grows exponentially every day. I don't know how I ever found time to work.

Entitlement Issues

Gulfstream G550: a good place from which to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

People who have too much money and people who have too little share one common trait. After a time they come to believe that they deserve their fate. They settle into the trappings of their lives, and wear their circumstances like a second skin. This settling works like a self-fulfilling prophecy. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. What started as purely fortune, whether good or ill, becomes the natural order of things.

This all became evident to me as I struggled to make sense of my own fall from grace. I knew that the economy had collapsed, not because of any real or fundamental change in productivity or capacity or supply or demand, but because of an artificial set of circumstances precipitated largely by global financial institutions. While everyone was pointing fingers at the bursting of the real estate bubble and the huge sludge pool of underwater sub-prime mortgages, I knew that the real culprit was the enormous and mostly unregulated market in over-the-counter derivatives, speculation in which had allowed, even forced, the underwriting of the toxic mortgage paper, which in turn had fueled the real estate bubble, which in turn brought us all low when it burst.

The great irony in all this is that the investment bankers and speculators who brought us this mess escaped with our money. They fleeced us. Treasury and the Fed helped them do it. The big audit firms blessed the ubiquitous bookkeeping legerdemain. And when their overvalued and under-performing assets became problematic, we bailed them out. I've written about all this before. So have a lot of other people. If you'd like to sort all this out for yourself, I recommend the following:

• Too Big to Fail – Andrew Ross Sorkin
• Freefall – Joseph E. Stiglitz
• 13 Bankers – Simon Johnson
• The Devil's Casino – Vicky Ward
• Griftopia – Matt Taibbi

These are by no means exhaustive, but they do, together, convey the broad sense not only of what went wrong and why, but that nothing that was broken has been fixed in any real, meaningful way. You should not read the last three without taking your blood pressure medication.

The tragedy is that, even though the contributory problems still lie festering under the surface, nobody cares anymore. The economy is recovering. The markets are orderly. We've got other problems to occupy our collective consciousness. The Middle East is in flames. Japan is radioactive. Charlie Sheen is taking us all to school in a completely different kind of China Syndrome. Who has time to worry about something that happened three years ago, even if many of us are still trying to crawl out of the smoking ruins of our former lives. It's apparently time to move on. I'm trying, but moving on is about as easy as loving my enemies or turning the other cheek.

When I first lost my job, the Lehman Brothers collapse was all over the news. The Lehman debacle was the precipitating event, the end of the beginning, the thing that galvanized the movers and shakers in government and on Wall Street to come together and save themselves from the disaster they had created. These were historic events: rewriting Fed rules to allow the lending of funds to investment banks and insurance companies, death spiral deal making facilitated by government functionaries who came from and would return to the institutions they were regulating, the sale of the TARP program (a one-page legislative mandate) to a panicky Congress by a credible Chicken Little. I was enthralled, and, being unemployed, I had plenty of time to immerse myself in the heady details.

I'd like to say that I learned, among other things, how the other half lives, but it's not the other half. It's more like the other 0.00001%. I learned how the guys in the ethereal high plains of self-entitlement live. They are not like you and me. They may have been once, but no more. They no longer carry the burden of living and working at the sufferance of others. They are the ones who do the suffering, and they do it from high-rise glass office towers, multimillion dollar Manhattan apartments, the custom appointed cabins of their Gulfstream G-550's, and palatial estates where their wives enjoy closets that are bigger than my house.

The most disconcerting thing about all of this is that it became obvious to me that these folks honestly believe that they deserve everything they have and more. They actually think they got where they are because they are smarter, more industrious, better prepared, more enlightened, and ultimately more deserving than the rest of us. They have bought in, wholesale, to their own bullshit, and they are occupied, full-time, curating their singular circumstances.

The rest of us let them do it. We've bought into their bullshit as well. We think they deserve what they've accumulated, and mostly just because they managed to do it without going to jail. So when Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Trust says we don't need any more banking regulation, we don't think that maybe Jaime's not ready to put down the fleecing sheers just yet. Instead we think, he's smart and he's rich, he must know what he's talking about. And, when Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs says they didn't bilk their investors out of billions by selling them bundled mortgages that had been hand selected by the firm that stood to profit most if they defaulted, and that their investors were sophisticated speculators who should have been able to figure out what Goldman wasn't telling them, we don't think he's talking out of both sides of his mouth at once. This is Goldman Sachs, for crying out loud, not some fly-by-night investment chop shop like Bernie freaking Madoff.

People listen to people with money. It hardly matters what they say. This is why Donald Trump is able, with a straight face, to tell us that one of his most attractive qualities as a candidate for the Presidency is that he's rich. He apparently believes this is sufficient to convince us of his sincerity, intelligence, leadership, and good judgment in spite of the overwhelmingly contrary evidence of his hair, and the fact that he let his marital infidelity with Marla Maples in 1990 play out on prime time network TV.

If this were all there were to it, that we listen to and believe rich people because they are rich, it probably wouldn't bear remarking. The sad thing though is the other side of the coin—that we don't listen to or believe the impoverished, the more than half that is not in the 0.00001%, the half that does not suffer in executive jets or ride private helicopters to work. Us. You and me. Hell, we don't even believe each other.

I mentioned the other day that I have ascribed to myself 1/40^th the relative value of Bill Gates. By this I mean that I think that my ideas, conviviality, cleverness, and good nature, are, on average, at least 1/40^th as good as his. I don't think this is a vain assumption on my part. I think your ideas, etc., are probably that good as well, and I don't even know who you are.

That being the case, I also don't think it's unreasonable for me to demand from the nebulous creative energy of the limitless universe, the deliberately secularized power behind the so-called law of attraction, that I should receive something akin to 1/40^th of Bill Gates' net worth—specifically $749,000,000. If I had $749,000,000 people might actually begin to listen to me. Some of them might even read my frigging book. 

Day 255 – The Ant and the Grasshopper

            I always liked the Aesop fable about the grasshopper and the ant. The ant spends the summer storing up grain and supplies for the coming winter while the grasshopper sings and plays the fiddle and, in some tellings, ridicules the ant for wasting the idyllic days with industry. When winter comes the ant is warm and well provisioned while the grasshopper is cold and hungry. When the grasshopper comes knocking on the ant’s door for a handout, he is in turn roundly castigated by the ant for wasting the plenteous days of summer with idle pursuits when he should have been working to store up provisions.

The grasshopper is turned away to die in the ancient versions of this story, and invited in to sing and dance in exchange for the ant’s largesse in some more modern iterations. I like the versions where the ant shares his bounty better than the ones where the grasshopper dies. This may be because I am now forced by circumstances to consider that I have in fact become one of life’s grasshoppers.

          There are more modern versions still—sarcastic ones but apocryphal nonetheless—where government intervenes on the grasshopper’s behalf, condemns the ant for greed and acquisitiveness, confiscates the ant’s wealth, and redistributes it to the grasshopper. The left-leaning sensibilities of our modern world, the re-spinners of this yarn would have us believe, have turned Aesop’s wisdom upside down.

          I am not a communist, not a socialist, not a Marxist. I do not believe in the forced redistribution of wealth. I do not think it is a good idea to strip the risk-takers and innovative thinkers of the comforts they have managed to accumulate for themselves by industry and perseverance and to give it to a bunch of lay-abouts in the interest of social fairness. I think doing this is an excellent way to guarantee the end of progress and the diminution of wealth and quality of life for society as a whole.

          I am still, however, as I have already pointed out several times, a vengeful bastard. So if you are talking about stripping the executive helicopter from Joe Gregory (Lehman Bros.) or the $6,000 suits from Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan) or the Manhattan apartment from Lloyd Blankfein (Goldman Sachs) or the multimillion dollar bonus from any one of several thousand bank executives and traders who profited hugely from the financial troubles that are still troubling the rest of us, and giving that stuff to me, then I say go for it. It’s only fair. After all, these scalawags precipitated a forced redistribution of wealth in the name of unabashed capitalism, and they remain, not just unrepentant, but proud of their accomplishments.

          These yahoos, just like the muddling managers I used to work for, have broken the system that sustains them, and now, while the victims of their shameful duplicities, frauds, and ignorance languish in unemployment, despair and powerlessness, they are engaged in self-congratulatory celebrations of their return to profitability. They made the hard choices, they say, they took their lumps such as they were, and emerged stronger than ever from the wreckage they caused. Who in their right mind does not believe that these lugubrious flim-flammers should be rounded up and horse whipped?

          Ah, but I digress—easy when you are a grasshopper, and even easier when you consider that, in the current circumstances, the ants have not fared very well either. In fact the ants may have suffered worse than us grasshoppers. They certainly had more to lose at the outset.

Sometimes, when I think of what might have been, I am glad that I didn’t give up the life I had at the time in order to make a better one in the future. Sure, I worked hard for what I got, but I didn’t give up as much life balance as I could have in order to accumulate stores for my future. And what I did get I mostly spent when I got it—better in retrospect than denying myself for a future that was going to be stolen from me in any event. How pissed would I be then? Pissed enough perhaps to have joined the Tea Party so I could go to rallies with crackpots and stare at Sarah Palin’s bosom.

As a grasshopper I depend on the ants. Their surplus is my birthright. Not all of it mind you, just the amount they are willing to give up for my fiddling and dancing. This is not without precedent. There are others who add no value to our economy, but still manage to fare very well on stipends for their entertainment value. Tom Cruise comes to mind, Brad and Angelina, virtually all the various Real Housewives (very few of whom it turns out really are), Paris Hilton, Perez Hilton, the Kardashians, everyone from Twilight.

These are just the most egregious examples I can think of. Arranged into categories, professional athletes, entertainers, artists and writers, celebrities of every stripe are useless in terms of their ability to add to the collective wealth of society. These people are all paid from the stores of the real producers among us, and many of them are paid very well indeed. They are paid so well that a lot of actual productive workers aspire to be just like them.

Now there is a world turned upside down, although it may be as much due to the attendant fame and sex appeal as to the pay scale. Who would not rather be tricked out in the resplendent colors of the grasshopper above than the drab monochromatic uniform of the fire ant I wrote about some days ago? On the other hand, if one were going to try to relieve Jamie Dimon of one of his resplendent suits, who would not rather have the formidable resources of the fire ant at his disposal? The fire ant’s arsenal though is the exclusive preserve of power mongers and rebels. In the world where I live, the world where fables are mostly just entertainment, the ants would mostly rather be grasshoppers.