Granddad's world is gone; does it have to be?

A friend of mine yesterday said, "My dad was a 43-year IBM guy. But that world is gone. I want my kids to understand that they have to be creative, that it's ok to morph yourself over time, and that they need to keep their skills sharp and fresh."

She's right. Up to a point. My father spent forty-some years with one employer, too, and certainly I don't have that kind of life, and I don't expect the next generation will either. But that's not to say that we should simply accept the kind of crazy up-one-second-down-the-next world we're in right now.

Great economic shakeups do cause great disruption to the social fabric. In the nineteenth century, with the Industrial Revolution, thousands of skilled weavers found themselves out of work and their talents valueless. The same sort of upheaval is happening now. But in between those days and the present day, as the new ways of business sorted themselves out, people found a way to balance the needs of the work lives and the needs of their personal lives.

"Work-life balance" is a buzzword these days, but in the middle of a major recession, massive layoffs, declining assets, and the like, it's hard to find any kind of balance. It's hard not to wake up in the middle of the night in a panic. It's hard to think about what kind of a life we'd like to live.

But this is the time to think about that. We have more power to shape the world than we think. My friend's father could stay at IBM for 40 years because of the unwritten contract of loyalty between employer and employee. That contract has been broken by employers -- generally citing the need to be "loyal" to their shareholders -- and we have all suffered for it.

These days, with 401ks and IRAs, most of us are those shareholders. And instead of screaming at our fund managers for not making quite enough money for us this quarter, we need to think about the longer view, about where we want to be in five years, not five months. About what kind of world we will leave to our children, not how many dollars.