The labor’s love lost of a dead-end dad
I SEE THEM on the street. Guys about my age, some a little younger, all of them with enough miles on the clock to belong somewhere else in the middle of the day. A few have that deer-in-the-headlights look but most hide it well, striding purposefully to the gym, the supermarket, the kids’ school at pick-up time, nowhere in particular. They form the world’s newest problem demographic: the high-achieving, newly laid-off dad.
Women get sacked too. Any economic downturn that vaporized 2.6 million jobs in the US alone last year, drove the jobless rate toward double digits across Europe and reversed decades of economic progress in Asia, is bound to be an equal-opportunity unemployer. But this recession seems to be taking an especially heavy toll on the more senior managers, analysts, loan officers, auditors, sales reps, architects, designers, account executives and other educated stalwarts of the upper-middle class, the ones who are conspicuously expensive to keep on the payroll. A lot of those important cogs are guys, with families and mortgages and golf club memberships, who never thought they’d be at loose ends in mid-afternoon, listening to their savings dwindle.
What you should know about guys is that we are boringly one-dimensional. We’re overly disposed to identify work with worth, income with inner strength, usefulness with what we are. For us, to be idle is to die. Inconveniently, we’re also strangers in our own homes, casual about clutter, awkward with a vacuum cleaner and not entirely sure which wash option to use or where the fabric softener goes. Truth is, we envy women their domestic graces, their easy friendships, their dense thickets of chums and contacts.
Because we’re guys, we don’t stand still. We turn looking for a job into a full-time job, working the phones from the den, posting résumés to long-shot websites, even starting our own industry blogs. The kids tiptoe around the house to avoid disturbing us. We worry about no longer being heroes to them. When we turn the prison searchlight of our attention on them, unfortunate souls, we frog march them off to parks, museums, after-school programs and other enrichment activities with the manic enthusiasm of a full-time job seeker. Idleness is death. The wife looks for a job of her own just to get out of the house.
I know all this because I was, in a sense, one of these dead-end dads myself. A few years ago I took a package, as they say, and pondered what to do next. I didn’t need another job, but I was still young(-ish) enough, and proud. After a few months at home I began to worry about the example I was setting for the kids, though by then they were old enough to have found other role models. My wife was glad to have me around. But I began to long for the structure of a morning staff meeting and a full agenda, the camaraderie of the coffee wagon, the luxury of a tech staff to debug my computer. Mostly, I missed feeling useful.
It took months of therapy – unpaid, from my wife – to come to my senses. I finally realized how much of my life had been wasted confecting and consuming hapless memos, powerless and pointless PowerPoints, brain-sucking meetings, goods and services nobody really needed. All those useless years of trying to be useful.
These disengaged dads can’t wait to get back into the game. They have expenses to meet, lifestyles to maintain, bread to win. I want to tell them that it’s all fatuous, soul-destroying claptrap. I want to march into the Starbucks where they crouch over their lattes and laptops and rouse some serious rabble. Specifically, I want to organize these losers into a band of superheroes, the kind their kids would truly admire: mild-mannered former reporters and accountants, fund managers and risk assessors who – using the skills they once honed for the profit of bone-headed bosses – now solve crimes, right wrongs and bring truth and justice to the land. Or at least clean up the environment, develop renewable sources of energy, correct the global imbalance in income distribution, bring clean water and a decent education to every child.
But I know they won’t listen. They have their own goals, customer-focused instincts, self-starting gumption. They’ve spent half a career mastering supply-chain management or media buying or securities analysis, and they want to leverage the investment. They want to re-conquer the world their way. They’re guys. They’re dopes.
