The Daily Grind

At the Daily Grind coffee shop in Cortland, New York, I watched a steady stream of farmers in overalls, contractors in flannel shirts, and 9-to-5 employees in business dress, and I thought about how every town or neighborhood has a hub like this. Find a Daily Grind, full of regulars who stop in on their way to work, and you’ve found the heart of the work life of a city.

Listening to what was being said there, it became clear to me that the Cortlanders whose daily ritual I was observing were trying to make a living in a place where that is not always an easy thing to do—the town has an 11% unemployment rate and negative job growth.

People usually go about about dealing with work being hard to find in three distinct ways.

There’s a difference between someone who is honestly grieving the loss of income, or the fact that job-search has become a long, competitive, and difficult process, and someone who continuously uses these painful situations to justify being miserable and grumpy.

GIVE UP
Some don’t even bother. Parked outside the café, there was a pickup truck which looked like it could have belonged to a dust-bowl farmer from the 1930s. It had a bumper sticker which read, “Cortland County: Largest Welfare Population and Proud of It.”

But giving up isn’t usually so overt. More often it takes the form of a gradual withdrawal.

We normally hear this expressed in the disclaimer that unemployment figures don’t reflect those who have stopped trying to find work.

Why? Have they run out of things to do? Do they feel so discouraged they’ve lost the energy to keep going?

For whatever reason, I suspect it was a decision they made alone. Isolation and giving up go hand in hand.

Fortunately, the mirror image is also true—the support of others helps people stay the course. Just as it “takes a village to raise a child,” it takes a community to find work.

GRUMBLE
Then there are those who are still grieving the loss of a change in their economic circumstances.

Their inability to accept what is results in a need to continuously give voice to their shock, disbelief, and anger that this could be happening to them. Often this comes out as a litany of complaints about working conditions or the job market.

I actually heard a professional woman in her fifties being interviewed on the PBS News Hour emphatically say she wanted her office and her staff back and she shouldn’t have to look for a job!

There’s a difference between someone who is honestly grieving the loss of income, or the fact that job-search has become a long, competitive, and difficult process, and someone who continuously uses these painful situations to justify being miserable and grumpy.

When you pay close attention to the words and faces of people around you, like I did in the coffee shop, you can readily identify those for whom "daily grind" refers to more than coffee.

Talking to others about our struggles, particularly when the loss is new and the feelings are raw, can play a useful part in our healing process, but we need to become aware of when the story of how we’re suffering goes on too long or we tell it too many times.

When we get in the habit of venting to people who are also stuck in negativity we end up expending our emotional energy in a way that moves us in the wrong direction, down, not up! The question then becomes, are the conversations we’re having helping us to move forward, or are they building a case for giving up?

MOVE FORWARD
In her biography of Dorthea Lange, the photographer whose images of the Great Depression have become iconic, Linda Gordon observes, “Economic depression had a literally depressing effect on many … but Lange’s response, by contrast, was a desire to do something.”

She did this by using her camera (she called it her “tool for seeing”) to record what she saw, first immediately outside the window of her studio in San Francisco, and then in the fields where migrant laborers worked and in the camps where they lived.

By shifting her focus from inside, where she made portraits of the rich and famous, to outside, where the hungry were lined up at soup kitchens in America’s cities and uprooted farmers from the middle of the country were trekking west desperately seeking work, she found her calling.

She changed direction without having the vaguest idea of how she would support herself financially. She had no idea that her choice to do this would lead to her being hired by government agencies and provide opportunities that would make her reputation as a photographer.

She connected to what was important to her instead of clinging to the past. Unlike her colleagues, who were lamenting the disappearance of work for artists, she put something creative into the economic void of the Depression—and when I speak of her creativity, I am not referring to her talent as a photographer. What she created was a purpose for herself within the reality of the times she lived in.