Shortly after I finished my doctoral program in 1999, I wrote my first book, Living in Uncertainty, Living with Spirit. It was my first attempt of many to try to articulate how I personally could live on a daily basis as any certainty and security regarding the future eroded away in my own life.
Our daily living involves, in one way or another, some kind of habitual cultural practice that orients us towards the future, as we collectively conceive it. For example, we engage in many practices in order to make enough money for the sake of some privileged lifestyle that we have identified with. My personal “in order to” and “for the sake of” came under threat during the nineties and I was compelled to find a new cultural practice—one that could reflect and articulate a very uncertain and quite unknown future, at least for me.
At the time I looked with envy at the apparent security of “everybody else” who had work and a relatively known future to look forward to. I felt like a dropout or, worse, an “alien”. Still I persisted with my effort to find a cultural practice that could give me a way to live in my personal world of uncertainty and insecurity. And as my subsequent books and essays show, I have succeeded, at least in some small degree. But already at that time in the nineties I had sensed that the question of finding a meaningful cultural practice that could reflect a time of great uncertainty went beyond my personal situation. As I wrote in the introduction of my book:
Flat tires, ATM closures, Internet “downtime”, lost credit cards, crashing computers, late buses, keys that don’t work, stolen handbags, lost directions, bumbling bureaucrats, mislabelled consumer goods, software viruses, are all met with irritation, angry assertion of “my rights” and a conspiratorial rush to eliminate all evidence of the disruption to the other-wise smooth operations of our lives… Our modern culture is left searching for security within present circumstances by means of constructed institutions such as health insurance, departments of homeland security etc., and seeking certainty of the future in a similar fashion—superannuation funds, pensions, life insurance etc. Ironically, we have instead constructed a culture of great insecurity (anxiety) and uncertainty.
Little did I know at the time how much truth there was in that short summary! It seems like the collective in 2018 is beginning to feel what I was pointing to at the time in the nineties. In the national news of Australia yesterday I read this astonishing headline and report:
Insecure Work The ‘New Norm’ As Full-Time Job Rate Hits Record Low: Report
For the first time in recorded history, less than half of all working Australians have a permanent full-time job with leave entitlements, new research reveals.
The Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work has crunched ABS data to find a dramatic rise in “insecure” work in the past five years, with employees missing out on benefits like paid holidays, superannuation and sick leave…. paid full-time employment with leave entitlements dropped to 49.97 per cent of all workers.
Meanwhile, part-time work rose to 31.7 per cent of employment — the highest to date — and the rest of the workforce was made up of self-employed, casual and underemployed workers.
“Insecure work has become the new normal,” Mr Stanford said.
Among the other key findings in the report were younger Australians who were suffering most, with full-time work for those under 30 dropping from 42.5 per cent in 2012 to 38.9 per cent in 2017.
And underemployment as share of total employment rose from 7.6 per cent to 9.1 per cent.
“Young workers confront the worst features of the precarious labour market, despite higher educational attainment than any previous cohort of Australians,” the report reads.
“Indeed, almost 50 per cent of workers aged 25-34 have completed tertiary education … but the prevalence of insecure work prevents most from applying their skills to the fullest.”
This astonishing social reality carries the consequence that everything we once did in the form of meaningful cultural practices geared towards a secure and certain future are falling apart. The need for a new set of cultural practices oriented towards an uncertain future and for which security is not the main issue has never been greater. At the moment, however, our society is just beginning to feel the rumbles, expressed as “insecure employment”, particularly among our young people. We are still in the worn-out thinking mode of “what can we do about it?” meaning, “how can we restore certainty and security.”
We have to learn how to think in an entirely new way about how to address uncertainty and insecurity as the props holding up our familiar but eroding sense of a certain and secure future continue to collapse.
Stay tuned!