You’ve heard of the Great Resignation. The Big Quit. As Andrea Hsu wrote, “Many [people] are rethinking what work means to them, how they are valued, and how they spend their time.” Hsu, like most others, attributed the Great Resignation to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Maybe the pandemic was the proximate cause; the trigger. But take a couple steps back for a longer view, maybe as long as about a century or so. Changes like what we’re going through — and bigger — been gestating for a long time. After all, most of the things we take for granted as having “always been this way” have not been this way for very long at all. As a great many of them can be shown to be unsustainable over the long term, they’re inevitably going to disappear. Millions of people commuting to and from work most days of the week? “Jobs” as they are today for most people? Human experience stretches back tens of thousands of years. The percentage of that span including most of the things we take for granted these days? Far, far less than 1%. It’s like those diagrams of the history of the universe that, right at the end, show the comparative amount of time humans have existed. Vanishingly negligible.
People have seen changes coming for a long time. So have you, if you’ve been looking around. Maybe you’ve read books showing a different style of life that’s existed right within “normal” society. On the Road by Jack Kerouac is one of those; it’s the story of counterculture characters who exist in the margins of society.
You might have seen plays that delve into issues like the problems with materialism, dissatisfaction with contemporary life, and people feeling dehumanized, frustrated, and futile. Edward Albee wrote plays delving into these aspects of “the modern condition” like The Zoo Story, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and A Delicate Balance.
You don’t have to turn to books or theater to find people talking about fundamental changes in society. Rock and roll is a whole genre about dissatisfaction and rebellion, and I’ve heard it’s fairly popular. And it didn’t come out of nowhere; jazz, blues, and other music contributed. Back in the 1950s you might get the latest LP from Chess Records and if you listened carefully, you’d hear yearning for changes; differences in lives and jobs and work. There was folk and folk-rock too. Singer-songwriters like James Taylor have been telling us for decades.
Changes are coming. And we can’t say we weren’t warned. Oh, and everybody I just mentioned was born on March 12!
