On Coming Back

This book is, more than anything, for older job-seekers — though it’s a little alarming that it appeared in 2020, well before ChatGPT launched in late 2022. Fawn Germer aims her self-help at people who have taken a break from work, or who have let themselves grow complacent on the strength of long experience. In her view, experience simply isn’t enough anymore; things change too fast for it to make much difference. Employers want adaptable, flexible workers who can move with the currents of the time — new attitudes, new cultural dispositions, new technologies — and without those skills an employee, whether manager or executor, is as good as irrelevant.

There’s something to the idea that this is a twenty-first-century, self-help version of Toffler’s Future Shock. Toffler saw the great acceleration underway in the mid-twentieth century, and now it’s here; I think we were too slow to talk about it, and now it’s too late. As Nick Land writes in one of his essays, from his later, reprehensible period:

The suspicion has to arrive that if a public conversation about acceleration is beginning, it’s just in time to be too late. The profound institutional crisis that makes the topic ‘hot’ has at its core an implosion of social decision-making capability. Doing anything, at this point, would take too long. So instead, events increasingly just happen. They seem ever more out of control, even to a traumatic extent. Because the basic phenomenon appears to be a brake failure, accelerationism is picked up again.

Germer is far less theoretical than Land could ever be, and her advice is pragmatic: pick yourself up, learn new skills, lean into the transformations circling us. There’s nothing much to be done about them — you either get with the program or get lost.

The book has only grown more relevant since it was published. Covid-19, technological change, and the increasing layoffs and gutting of grants in the U.S. federal government are reshaping both the public and nonprofit sectors; even someone at a local or state government or a charity is very likely affected. And the competition for the remaining jobs is intense, with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, entering the American job market. So what do we do? We learn — everything we can. We sharpen our appearance, notice the trends, refuse to grow comfortable in our maturity, because young people are filling the management ranks and they don’t want to be patronized. If all else fails, there’s always the grift of the gig economy, or starting your own business.

As uncomfortable as Germer made me, what she has to say is genuinely important, and there’s a lot to learn from it — including good material on age-related discrimination that will be especially useful to anyone over forty-five.