Sometimes I talk to friends about how to end my first world underemployment. People wonder what it is I want (other than for someone else to do my marketing for me). So here I am going to describe what, ideally, I would want, and then it will be clear that I won't get it, because, as you will see, everything has changed.
In the previous century, when the world was new, and we were in the 1970s and the 1980s, I was able to get friends and acquaintances work, or a project, by simply knowing who was looking for work, and who was looking to hire someone and doing a match. Maybe one or two phone calls. I was able to get a lot of people work. People would meet, see if there was a match and only then was salary and human resources involved. It is hard to say how many people I helped, but maybe a dozen or two.
But the world has changed since then. Consider: back then not many people knew this stuff (computer technology, programming, networks, graphics, etc). Everyone was younger, and relatively new to their career. So that meant they cost less, and also they would not be a threat to anyone currently working. They probably had been recently working, or just out of college, or maybe back from a trip to Europe. We all knew each other, generally speaking.
Plus, and for what it is worth, I was good at this. I was good at matching needs to people and I had some excellent successes.
But the world has changed since then in all the obvious ways one can deduce from what I wrote above.
So when I can't seem to get work, usually because of choices I made that turned out to be inadvisable, or because of health issues, the less said the better, or for other reasons, I did not fit the profile of what people were looking for. Of course I did not see it that way, but that is another story.
I am pining for the old country, perhaps, across the seas, no longer in existence.
It is also true that there are other forces at work, with my friends, and the internet, and corporations, that are less benign, but this is at least one of the issues.
