Down Turn

I should be spending my day filling in job applications, but perhaps instead I’ll spend some time on the wider issue. The rich are getting richer while the rest of us are struggling. Perhaps not struggling to eat or put a roof over our heads but struggling to meet the expectations that have been dictated to us through our formative years. Two of my closest friends have both lost their jobs in the last 6 months and I’m scraping by in a part time role. We all work in different sectors, myself in the great outdoors, one friend in nano-chemistry the other in fashion design. Meanwhile, those with jobs they dislike are told to feel grateful for what they have and are too afraid to make a foray in to an overcrowded and uncertain jobs market. This is life of middling adults in an economically south facing society, we’re waiting for the sun to pop up over the horizon, swing round and bathe our faces but as yet, there is no sign. Instead we make the most of what we’ve got, cut back and economise whilst watching those on the television making more and more money and squirreling it away in off shore bank accounts and turning their back on an economy and a country beset with an imbalance that needs redressing.

The reality I face might not be the end of the world in comparison to the upheavals and suffering in the other parts of the world, but our injustice of rising outgoings and static incomes is becoming to hit home. These are my early thirties, I may not act my age but I’m starting to look and feel it; wouldn’t it be nice to take on some of those things that come with age – wealth, ownership, supporting your dependants – but finances make all these things at best risky at worse an impossibility. The distractions are many and various – endless shelves of music, films and books, hundreds of channels of television, theatre, shopping, restaurants, sports, leisure in all its guises and of course the new found distraction of this century, computerised technology. With all of this on offer there is no reason to make room for time to think about the realities of your existence, it just bubbles away in the background and rears its head when someone takes the time to have a serious conversation but more likely we’ll just concern ourselves with frivolity and struggling on. Time to go get distracted...