BouncingBabyBoomer.com

On becoming an "Encore" worker

My hub and I have just become "micro" workers at a large university. I say "micro" since we are each committing small amounts of time for what amounts to micro pay. In his case, it is a 1/4 time position at a pay grade miles below his last full-time salary. In brief, he will be netting less than 1/10th of his former pay to give them 1/4 of his time during the coming year -- all of course with no benefits.

But hey, it's a job. A nice job, in fact, doing something he finds truly neat, bringing business world methods to academic R&D. So it will keep his resume current while doing some good on both sides.

In my case, the pay is more psychic. I have a nice title, a tiny stipend, and a lot of leeway to shape my flex-time role in a campus lab doing brain science. Technically, I am not a real employee; I have a time-limited fellowship sponsored by an outside entity. In business, we would call me a consultant. But "senior fellow" will sound nice on my resume too; and like the hub, I have a smalll quixotic hope it might aid in some way with some real pay some day. If not, at least I will learn some interesting things about current-day research while helping them to communicate.

That may be as win-win as it gets in this frozen economy.

 

We each got our gigs on the same campus at the same time via different routes. He was recruited after his second year judging in a national science fair that put him on the radar at the School of Engineering. I applied for my mine in response to a flyer found on a table after a lecture, and wound up being one of four people picked for a cross-disciplinary program in Psych.

That our offers came around the same time seemed completely coincidental. We did not know when we accepted these posts that we were joining a movement with a name. But, in fact, we are part of a new wave of "Encore" workers filled with Boomers extending careers with new kinds of employment. 

Points of Light in the Clouds

It's fascinating to watch a whole culture re-compile on the fly, and if I want some encouragement during these downer times, it helps me to look at how good we Americans are at re-inventing ourselves while re-shaping our environments. For that kind of encouragement, I can already find many points of light in the blogosphere where new forms of creativity are blooming left and right. Below some recent examples:

1. Creative Perspective
This week I stumbled on a wonderful visualization site, WallStats.com, the creative overflow stack of graphic artist, Jess Bachman. At left is a thumbnail corner of the vivid graphic that first put him on my own radar -- a diagram of what the bailout might mean to you and me, Jane and Joe Taxpayer. If you go there, click around. He has a number of interesting messages and data sets that show his point as much as tell it. If we can't fix this mess anytime soon, perhaps it's a bit of comfort to gain more perspective.

2. Creative Frugality
Have you begun to wonder yet how extended hard times might effect younger Boomers and their sibs who grew up accustomed to "living large" in better times? A number of younger bloggers are thinking about that too, and what you might call "creative frugality" is already gaining buzz among the Twittering and Thumb-texting set who are joining the ranks of the newly unemployed (see also item 3 below). One example is the "Nate's Cents" blog on making the switch to living lean without giving up all pleasure. We oldsters may smile to see so many of our own former life themes re-framed, but hey, at least the kids were listening. Perhaps we can tune into them ourselves and learn a few new things. Meanwhile, since I am not so far past parenting teens, I got a good grin from this post which gives a sense of how some 20-somethings might coach each other when they think the 'rents aren't listening.

Grin of the Week: Re-Thinking Our Icons

 

Re-Thinking 21st Century Icons
(click on image to see it full size; kudos to the unknown artist for the excellent grins.)

Upsides in the Down?

My delayed return to posting here has been less about the holidays and more about my mood. I have been too depressed by the financial mess to say very much upbeat. So to drop kick myself out of the doldrums, I am going to think out loud about some things that prick a few rays of light in my clouds.

Where am I taking my encouragement when rays of light seem so few and far between? Let me free associate to see which top dozen things come to mind..
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My Top Dozen Rays of Hope for 2009

12. That Obama will take office on 1/20/09 (to feel even more encouraged about him, read this candid Time profile if you haven't seen it).
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11. That we are seeing so many well-tempered minds in high places again and it is no longer un-PC to admire an extra-strong intellect
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10. That when I want to just escape and forget for a bit, there will soon be new episodes of old faves on TV (House, Lost, 24, Galactica, and [eventually] Mad Men)
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9. The emerging return of mutual respect on the international stage, both towards us and from us. One does get the sense that many countries are sincerely cheering us on (except when not).
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8. That there is more and more accessible science content in print and on TV (e.g. SciQ and Brink on the Science Channel). Whatever the challenge, from the economy to the environment, we all will need a stronger grasp of how complex systems tend to operate. Meanwhile the nation is also gaining a clue about how big a difference healthy eating can make (a la Michael Pollan and Matt Goulding) and this awareness will pay back from our waistlines to our pocketbooks and help us make headway in health care too.
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7. I see increasing traffic on intelligent web sites (Salon, Slate, NYT, Wired, Seed) where good minds can cross-pollinate good ideas with a hope they will compound into wider understanding
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6. Encouraging headlines in health and medicine remind us almost daily of how much we have already achieved and how much more is coming soon (watch for another Top12 list this week)
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5. That already we are remembering how it feels when less turns out to be more.
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4. At my own desk, I am grateful every day that Windows XP is still alive, cloud computing is getting so good, that so much of the Net is still entirely free and that there is often something on You Tube to make me grin (e.g. RoombaCat)
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3. On the serious side of the street again, I am also grateful we are gaining perspective on how we got into this financial mess (such as this Mea Culpa and this lookback from Stein, and these comments from Kristof on the upside in the down) even if we sure still dont know what to do with it.
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2. I also appreciate that so many people in positions of power are becoming more comfortable saying, "I don't know, but together we will figure it out." Global warming might be helped quite a bit just from the resulting reduction in hot air.
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1. Did I mention that Obama takes office in just a few days?

Two New Leads to Longevity

New Scientist had two bits of good news this month for people concerned with aging. First, it reported two groups of researchers showed that it might be possible to reverse cellular aging by preventing the loss of telomeres.  Next came news of a breakthrough in understanding what may be a "master control gene" that plays a pivotal role in aging too, by acting (or not) to suppress the expression of proteins in the wrong tissues. This latter finding in yeast might well lead to a "universal aging mechanism" said the scientists. Link to full article and the full image of the Sir1 protein.

Positive Thoughts About Crashing

As soon as I saw this header, I knew I had to note it for my "Upbeats in Downtimes" theme. Click through at the link to see why Andrew Leonard of How The World Works thinks this is merely one mother of a bear market and not the about-to-be end of life as we know it. Let us hope he is right.

While you are there you can learn about things like the "Ted Spread" which lets savvy investors track the pulse of banker confidence, and you can skim Leonard's list of "Indispensable Blogs" in his sidebar. On another upbeat, in a later post, Leonard also says he is tickled pink about the Geithner pick for Treasury Sec. HTWW will now get a bookmark from me, right after my quick-clicking link for the blog of Paul Krugman.

Health Care Change Gaining Traction?

I don't know about you, but I had the impression that full boat universal health care was going to unfold in phases under Obama. Perhaps I was wrong about that. Syndicated columnist David Sirota reports on Open.Salon that recent developments coming forth from the Democrats and the Obama camp suggest sweeping change is already brewing. Sample: Apparently Rahm Emmanuel told business leaders recently that "incremental increases in coverage won't be acceptable." Even the health care trade group is already telling its members that the industry needs to be making some "real concessions." Link to full article.

How Would You Do in 21st Century Med School?

There is a lot of talk these days about empowering patients to observe their own treatments and be their own advocates. This is supposed to give us a safety net and and reality check in a health care system that is increasingly stressed and error prone.

Somehow I doubt that Joe Doe Patient feels so empowered yet.

Since long before Drs. Kildare and Welby, there has been a mystical veil around matters medical. Doctors belonged to a rarefied order with its own language and rituals that only the most robust of minds could enter. It all left a lasting impression in the minds of many observers that mere mortals should not aspire to become physicians.

 

So what would you think here in 2008 if I told you that I was going to take a group of high school frosh and sophs with no prior training in science, and run them through a first year med school course in the pathology of disease?

What would you predict? Would you expect them all to flunk, or perhaps a few to at least earn a C, or maybe an eager beaver or two to earn an A or B? 

Keep on reading to see.

Exulting in Complexity

Barack Obama "exults in complexity," said Nicholas Kristof today in his NYT column, sounding as if he was feeling a mix of excitement and relief. I second those emotions.

It is so refreshing, on so many levels, to see pride in learning return to the White House. Or it will be, come January when we can listen to a president who "speaks in paragraphs rather than sound bites" and trust that he actually gets what he is talking about.

I was feeling pretty despondent on this topic in late September when the Palin pick was fueling an angry surge of people proud of being unschooled. It drove me to my own impatient essay, It's the Complexity Stupid, in which I wondered out loud how anyone sane could question the need to marshall the best of minds in the worst of times.

America has long had an anti-intellectual strain in which "careful deliberation is for sissies," Kristof notes wryly as he tracks this theme back through U.S. history. His essay, Obama and the War on Brains, is well worth the time to click through and read.

Living As If

A dear old pal of mine, Dave deBronkart, survived a very scary bout with kidney cancer last year inspiring all of his friends in the process. He is now doing great health-wise and loving his new role as an "E-Patient" advocate (my series on HealthCare 2.0 next week will include several mentions from Dave's E-Patient blog ). Dave also has a Google list he calls "Living As If Your Life Depended on It" which talks about living with added meaning.  I would like to take a leaf from his book and borrow part of his phrase to apply in a slightly different way.

I want to suggest starting right now, that we as a nation live "As If" we were already OK, and then keep that image in mind each day.

 

I don't mean casting back to the days of shopping until we dropped (if you ever did) or counting your extra money (if you ever made some) or sampling the best food and wine you can try. I mean casting ahead to where you -- as a person -- want to be when we finish this long march towards our recovery, and then living as if you are already there.

 

What do you intend to be doing with more prudence and less haste? Where will you be more sensitive or less driven? What will you simplify in your life to feel less burdened? Where do you plan to take more responsibility for how things work out? Where will you contribute to something larger than your own needs?

 

Whatever you imagine will be your new, better country and your new, better self in it, please keep that image near the front of your mind every day. It can be our own national version of "fake it until you make it."

 

It also has a much stronger chance of coming true that way.