“Poof Goes the Middle Class”
25th November 2013
Steve Pressfield is optimistic.
When I was a kid my dad’s dream for me was that I would become an engineer and work all my life for Lockheed or G.E. In other words be an employee. That was how the middle-class dream expressed itself in the days of American pre-eminence post-WWII, before the European countries had rebuilt their shattered economies, before the rise of Asia, India, South America, before outsourcing, before globalization, before the satellite and the microchip and the web.
Now all we hear is that the American Dream is dead. As I write this, I’m looking at an article in the L.A. Times (probably the 500th I’ve read) titled “Poof Goes the Middle Class.”
Well, that sure looks like the trend.
Maybe I’m delusional, but I think a sea-change is taking place right here, right now. I mean a good change. It’s below the radar. The government has nothing to do with it. The government doesn’t even know it’s going on.
What is this change? It’s happening on ten thousand blogs like this one and at a hundred thousand informal academies and webinars and one-on-one teaching exchanges or one-to-a-hundred mentoring events. Individuals on their own, driven by necessity and by their own dissatisfaction with their lives and their futures, are teaching themselves a new way of working in the world.
The change is reflected, even championed, by words like Seth Godin’s, “Don’t wait to be picked, pick yourself.”
People are becoming entrepreneurs. The mind-set of the employee is vanishing like the factory where it was born. It has to. We’ll all die if we wait for some force outside ourselves—business or government—to bring us jobs or teach us who we are or how we ought to live.
Root, hog, or die.