When you outlive your lifetime job

It feels so prudent to work for one company for many years. If you're sensitive to the negative consequences of ambition, if you are a naturally modest person, it seems almost virtuous to keep working for the same company through your entire adult life. This accentuates the psychological upheaval, even, sometimes, the sense of betrayal, when the company to which you have devoted your workaday life decides that what the company really needs right now is for you to go away. It doesn't seem right. After all, everyone agrees, even the person handing you the pink slip tells you, that it was nothing you did. It wasn't your fault. This implies, by its very grammar, that it was someone else's fault, that someone is, in fact, to blame. I noticed years ago that we never get so angry at someone else as when we are also mad at ourselves, and our anger at whomever we blame for layoffs may often be magnified by self-loathing for not having seen it coming, or, worse, foreseeing but not acting in time. Others are more qualified than I to help people who have been laid off already -- the state labor department's rapid response team actually includes counseling for those who want it -- but I have a few things to say to the rest of us, who could face a similar situation one day. The average American has several career changes in a lifetime. To work for decades with good pay and benefits for an airline or a hospital or a factory has always been exceptional employment, not just in the sense of "good" but also in the sense of "rare." Hawaii residents who have lost really good jobs have quickly learned that there are lots of jobs in our economy but few of them come close to the wages and benefits they enjoyed. There are, in real life, some cases where owners or bosses are so enlightened, and also so competent, that they are able to preserve jobs that others would quickly slash. We have seen this in Hawaii. But we have also seen the situation change in a heartbeat -- the Waikiki hotel where the patriarch died and the next generation didn't care -- Aloha Airlines, where management preserved jobs for years only to have investors suddenly realize it wasn't ever going to work for them and yank funding in a trice -- hospitals that preserved jobs only by running up ever larger operating deficits until someone else had to come in and do the dirty work. Wherever you work, however secure your job appears to be, however much you like your management or your ownership, you should never forget that it can change in a heartbeat. If it does, what will you do next? Do you have savings? Do you have skills that will make your employable elsewhere? Do you have amicable contacts at other companies? If a prospective future employer asked your colleagues what you're like to work with, will they sing your praises? The beauty of thinking like this is that being prepared for the worst will make you better, and happier, in your current job, even if it never goes away.