part 1: intro and the destabilization of career

by Nic Gibson
Some thoughts for my little brother and sisters in the faith on why some of my friend’s wives are going nuts.

For my parents, life had a script. The goal for most all people was the middle class American Dream: a house, a good career, a family, and a peaceful home. And for this narrative to work there were two stabilities necessary- the stability of marriage and the stability of household sustaining jobs. Marriages need to stay together and good jobs have to be stable.

Now it’s also important that this is not a global story. It is a local story. And it is probably worth noting that almost all lives have been locally-conscious lives. But these two things have changed since our parents formed their own stories here. Marriage and work have both changed. Work has both destabilized and become more emotionally central to our lives. With the expansion of the workforce to include women and the more recent expansion of global competition- stable, household sustaining work that demands limited hours (less than 45 weekly hours) has waned and destabilized. It’s just not easy to get that kind of work anymore; one job that can comfortably sustain a household.

At the same time, work has become an increasingly larger part of our functional and emotional identity. It determines a bigger part of ‘who we are’ in our own minds, and this is particularly true for women over the last 80 years. Think, for example, how TV shows take place more and more at work and less and less in the home. Fifty years ago, very few shows had ‘work’ scenes. Now, very few have ‘home’ scenes, that is, unless it’s a sex scene- but even for sex, the office and janitor closet are more and more the favored location (more exciting and cheaper sets). And it should be alerting to us that in our art, even our sex lives are weaved into our work lives instead of our home lives. And this artistic shift shows our shift of interest and identity from the hearth and table to the desk and office.

But more than that, our hopeful ‘mark’ on the world has transitioned from a product of the home to a product of our career. After all, families aren’t for everyone, but work is, a reversal of the old pattern. The recent shift among post-boomers to more non-profit and service careers has not changed this basic dynamic, only its sub-classification. The non-profit career may be a ‘better’ career in some humanistic way, but it is still a career and not a home. What has happened is an inversion of the fundamental human script- that the family is now a sub-plot to the career, rather than the career being the subplot to the family. The former stability of career and family has largely given way to the more unstable narrative of work and sex.

Read Part 2: "The Destabilization of Family"