news

한어Русский языкEnglishFrançaisIndonesianSanskrit日本語DeutschPortuguêsΕλληνικάespañolItalianoSuomalainenLatina

"Reverse Life"

On August 9, the movie "Reverse Life" directed and acted by Xu Zheng was released.

The film has attracted attention for its realistic tone similar to that of "Dying to Survive". However, in addition to the food delivery industry that the audience focuses on,The film is actually organized into a larger structure, and the plot that hits the audience is that Gao Zhilei, a programmer at a large company, is laid off in middle age. It touches on an equally sensitive social issue - middle-aged unemployment.If we put the film into the series of Xu Zheng's personal works, the turning point from "Lost in Hong Kong" to "Reverse Life" reflects the dangerous situation of the decline of the middle class.

What does a slipping middle-aged middle class look like?They have high education and income, and work hard, but they still fall into the abyss of class decline. Housing prices, childcare, 996, diploma devaluation, and middle-aged unemployment: how do these middle-class families survive? Not living, but surviving in the cracks. The decline of the middle class is not only happening in China.Full-time writer Alyssa Quart described the real situation of middle-class families in the United States in "Surviving in the Cracks: The Overburdened Middle-Class Families":Social security is becoming increasingly weak, the cost of childbirth is rising, pregnancy discrimination and gender discrimination are emerging, and middle-aged unemployment has become the norm. More and more white-collar workers find it difficult to have normal working hours, let alone maintain a balance between work and life.

The chapter we have selected not only tells the plight of the middle class who are unemployed in middle age, but also points out that businessmen take advantage of this general instability and flock to set up "Second Life" training institutions to find business opportunities. At the end, the author Alyssa Quart also gives a "successful" experience that is incomplete but still worth learning from.

After all, finding a way, being seen, and speaking out are all equally precious and important.

01

“I’ve fallen behind the world.”

It’s fall in Boston, and in one classroom, rows of students are dressed in business attire from different eras: flat shoes and beige stockings, mustard-yellow embroidered dresses, white dress shirts, and reading glasses.They are not students in their teens or twenties, but middle-aged.They are not taking traditional classes. Several women who call themselves "career guides" are teaching them job interview skills. If an interview is not successful, a guide wearing a pencil skirt, glasses and a warm smile will advise: "Don't blame yourself!"

Each attendee paid $20 to learn what seemed obvious at first: creating a resume on LinkedIn, mastering interview techniques, and overcoming depression in mini-workshops like "Battling Negativity." In another room, a professional photographer was taking professional photos of the attendees. They sat down under bright reflective umbrellas, looking a little reserved. These were middle-aged, middle-class people, white, Asian, and black. Most were suffering from unemployment or underemployment. They asked career guides how to find and keep a job. They believed they might have a chance to start over and have a new beginning.They must find another way to make a living or fall into poverty, and many of them are parents, making their needs even more urgent.

We are at the RE:Launch seminar.The conference was organized by Jewish Vocational Services (JVS), a Boston-based nonprofit organization.

What obstacles do you want to overcome? asks the career guide.

“I’ve fallen behind the world.”Tamara Spencer answered. She is in her early 50s and a former aerospace engineer. Like everyone else, she was wearing a cotton jacket that could be worn to a job interview. “I’m done with millennial engineering.”

"I haven't worked in 17 years," another woman shrieked, looking at her hands."I'm taking care of my family, but I'm a lawyer by training. I'm prepared to be rejected by employers."A silver-haired, soft-spoken preschool teacher confessed that she never lasted more than a year in a teaching position. A computer programmer said he was a negative person, with a voice inside him that kept muttering: This won’t work (I used to think that programmers were a perfectly safe profession, but soon realized that it was a profession obsessed with youth and the latest technology, constantly pushing out the old). A former restaurant general manager and sommelier also lost his job, confessing that he had just lost the lease on his apartment and was now homeless.

"Reverse Life"

The career guide said she could help them all.“We promise not to just tell you to be happy or keep smiling,” she said.

The others sat at their white plastic desks, shaking their heads.It was September 2016, eight years after the financial crisis that had caused all of this. The economy was said to be improving, and employment was up, but a large number of the new jobs were not going to the attendees of the all-day conference.JVS's office, a renovated rabbit hole in Boston's business district, is packed with hundreds of young job seekers every day, most of whom are polishing their resumes.

“Stay away from this negativity.“You’re not as flawed as you think you are,” one career coach said. She tried to get us on a routine—not having a 9-to-5 job was frustrating. Many motivational campaigns make job seekers feel a little (sometimes more than a little) guilty, but Starting Over offered something quite different. Career coaches carefully avoided what I considered “job shaming” and instead emphasized self-care during the job search.

"Yeah, it's all my mom's fault," one of the job applicants joked about his predicament in a thick Boston accent.In fact, many of the attendees’ struggles were caused by student loans or education and training debts. I can understand that.After all, more than 60% of Americans with student debt are over the age of 30.

The share of debt held by people older than middle age has increased dramatically since 2005, perhaps in part because more people are returning to school, but also largely because it takes longer to pay off existing college debt and the cost of undergraduate and graduate education has risen. These real-life examples embody a manipulated narrative, like an evil shadow cast on the wall.As one aspiring middle-aged nurse mother I interviewed experienced, debt collection agencies hound former students with horror-movie results.Some debt collection agencies even threaten these middle-aged debtors: they may already be surrounded by enemies. However, the enemy here is not a person, but an abstract concept: the financial expenditure figures accumulated over decades.

"Better Days"

02

Ageism Gives Birth to Second Life Industry

No amount of clever rhetoric or elaborate disguise can disguise the importance of age when people try to start a "second life".

The older you get, the worse it gets: If you’re unemployed over 55, it’s harder to find a job than when you’re 30, according to a study of long-term unemployment by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has seen a marked increase in age-discrimination complaints over the past two decades, with about 5,000 more complaints filed each year in recent years than in the late 1990s.The existence of age discrimination is obviously undeniable.If some of us want to continue to be workers, we will have to deny the existence of our bodies to some extent—bodies that age and give birth.

At the “Starting Again” seminar, people unfolded their reading glasses and opened their laptops as if it was the first day of school and having to go to this school was something they had never thought about.In another era, some of them would have retired instead of still looking for work;Alternatively, if their jobs have not been replaced by machines and have not been laid off, they can continue to do the work they have been doing.

"The backdrop of our economy is that people are facing increasing instability, so they have to start a second or third life, and the middle and upper classes are no exception.""Today's job market is incredibly tough for older workers and people who are unemployed," said Ofer Sharon, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-founder of the Career Transitions Institute.

Tokyo Sonata

In America, we believe in starting over—again, again. But now, as the middle class begins to become contractors, we must reexamine these stories about expensive second lives. For-profit colleges, certification programs, and coaches have joined this new trend—all of them offering "help," for a fee.Together, they form part of a larger, and sometimes worrisome, peculiarity that I call the “second act industry.”

Mentors for “career changers” preach about human potential, while they would have been planning retirement in previous eras. Some companies offer second-life coaching to professionals over 50, teaching them how to present themselves to new employers and which career direction to “change” to, for a fee of $20,000 to $90,000 a year.

Of course, much of the above preaching about how to package and promote yourself, build connections, and re-educate yourself at an older age in order to create the best second or third life is not without basis.In a country where people are taught to seek only individual solutions when faced with problems that are often systemic, the need for these services is real.

I Am Not the God of Medicine

03

How can such a dream be sold?

The popularity of the concept of professional Second Life also stems from a broader belief in human perfectibility:We had a transformative mentality toward individuality, culminating in the postmodern view of life’s trajectory that we have today.At its worst, the makeover mentality that permeates the Second Life industry feels like professional plastic surgery.

But switching jobs or careers isn’t as reliable as hyaluronic acid fillers, especially given the precarious job situation and the growing trend of automation affecting white-collar jobs. Thinking that you can adapt to the economic environment if you just spend enough time perfecting yourself is a happy fantasy that doesn’t always come true.

Its premise is flawed: Even if you are extremely well trained and qualified for the job, if no one is hiring you are still out of luck.

The Bicycle Thief

In the mid-20th century, people spent most of their lives, or even their entire careers, working for the same company. By the 1990s, when I entered the declining job market (when young people feigned a "lazy" personality, partly to protect themselves from rejection by the increasingly depressed job market), working for one company for a lifetime had become old-fashioned. It became an outdated cliché, like a gold watch given to retirees, symbolizing a kind of ordinary life that we can no longer obtain.

People are expected to move from one company to another, or to freelance.I realized this early on—I even remember a professor explaining it to me in graduate school.At the time, I was sadly questioning why I couldn't have the stable life my parents had, but was instead doing these weird odd jobs and writing stuff that only databases would read.The truth is that as the gig and freelance economy begins to eat into other jobs, the number of employees who have the opportunity to actually work for a company will soon be even smaller.

The Second Life industry thrives on this fantasy.It’s a positive wonderland that promises you a second chance in old age. The driving force behind this industry is that some people are missing out on the upward trajectory they should have. If the American Dream worked, people would have a clearer trajectory. Often your first job would lead you to your second job in the same industry, and if all went well, you’d stay there until you retired at age 65. But that’s no longer the case. American workers, including many of the people I met while writing this book, no longer have the structured trajectory their parents did.

The key is that Americans who are caught in the middle need to understand that feeling this way is not just their problem.Their suffering is caused by a huge institutional error.

04

What did people who successfully escaped from difficult situations do right?

We can also take a closer look at what those who have successfully escaped from difficult situations did right.

Michelle Belmont, who was introduced earlier in this book, still struggled to get out of poverty after becoming a professional librarian, but her pain from her financial situation was somewhat reduced. Her core problem was still the debt that left her with a lot of pain, much of which came from graduate school. Like many middle-class parents I interviewed:As of 2017, Belmonte still had $20,000 in credit card debt and $175,000 in student loan debt.

Blue Jasmine

Still, she turned her life around and is now much better off. Her family now rents a house in a relatively affordable area. “Maybe once I get my credit score up, in about five years, we’ll be able to buy something,” she predicts. (As of our last contact in 2017, she’s reached that goal sooner than expected and is in talks to buy a house.) Her son’s new daycare center is also a pleasant surprise, “miraculously” inexpensive and “excellent quality,” she says.

One reason Belmonte was able to turn her life around was because she worked hard to develop her own emotional resilience.Improving “grit” is one method recommended by the American Psychological Association (APA) to help a person overcome money-related pain. (The idea that people who are financially vulnerable are not resilient is itself, in my opinion, a mistake. So is the idea that they just need to improve their grit and ability to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” to create financial security, rather than a better job or adequate and affordable child care, etc.)

In Belmonte’s case, she also focused on practical matters, as the APA recommends: focusing on realistic goals and “small accomplishments,” like updating her resume, rather than dwelling on abstract emotions.Also following APA advice, she took “decisive action” rather than (in APA’s words) walking away from her problems altogether. One small but decisive action was an “aggressive” job search, as she puts it, which eventually led to a new full-time job that paid at least $100,000 a year. Her new job, combined with her husband’s $55,000, stabilized their middle-class status. She once made only $37,000 a year, but when she looked for work again, she found that her skills could be worth more.

“I feel relieved and no longer feel ashamed about my depression, anxiety and the debt I was in,” she said. “I still need to borrow money from family members occasionally for groceries, but now I can always pay them back within a month.”

Perfect Days

Belmonte’s story is a relatively rare Second Life success story, one in which she realized her situation was not her fault or that of her partner. The couple’s financial problems are now largely resolved. Her unexpected ending also proves that plot twists—the stuff of contemporary Hollywood screenwriters—can sometimes happen to real people, though the happy twists are often smaller and more subtle. Things can get bad, but they can also get good.Plot twists occur, but they are limited in scope and are neither completely tragic nor completely triumphant.

Related books

"Survival in the Cracks: The Overburdened Middle-Class Families"

[US] Alyssa Quart

"Surviving in the Cracks" describes the real situation of middle-class families in the United States today: social security is becoming increasingly weak, the cost of childbirth is rising, pregnancy discrimination and gender discrimination are emerging, middle-aged unemployment has become the norm, and more and more white-collar workers find it difficult to have normal working hours, let alone maintain a balance between work and life.

The people interviewed by the author include university professors, lawyers, nurses and child care workers. These traditional professions are no longer as rewarding as they used to be. Faced with high rents, heavy medical and education burdens, they have to struggle to maintain a superficial decency. For today's generation, it seems impossible to live the life that their parents did.