Perhaps it's just me; but I liked it better when things were the way in my father's time. His worklife and his personal life were completely separate. Work ended in the evening when he finished everything that had been thrown his way during the day, and then he left it behind for the next 12 hours. Since he worked at quality control, there was nothing for him to do about it once he left the factory. And when he was at work, he didn't run out for lunch, or go out to the health club for a midday workout. Today, I long for the simplicity of the concept that work went by back in the day. I think it was Silicon Valley that changed the whole work lifestyle that America knew and believed in until then. Silicon Valley was all about the job opportunities and creativity. A work pattern like my dads would be too rigid, too disrespectful of the creative trajectories that the scientists and the computer wizards there were taking the world through.
Lunch could extend to three hours, and work could extend to 3 a.m. Getting the most creative idea out there was all that mattered, and the rest of life had to fall in place where it could. Today, when you walk down the street, and the people you see tapping away on their phones or sprawled out over park benches staring at a laptop screen, they are not entertaining themselves most of the time. They are hard at work, and driven by a work ethic so strong, they don't need supervisors, or a definite work goal. While we may complain about the ubiquity of the entertainment that the iPhones and the laptops of our world spoil our children's mental spaces with, these devices were actually made for serious work by serious self-motivated individuals. We live in a world where the job never ends, and life is lived in the spaces allowed by lulls in the job. We are knowledge workers now, and the job today is everywhere. If you live in a large city that is a hub for the industry you love, this is what your job opportunities are today.
If what you love music, you head to New York, LA or Nashville; things will fall into place, given enough time. If finance or journalism is your thing, the job opportunities in New York and perhaps Chicago will keep you occupied for a lifetime. These are cities that have achieved a certain critical mass. The more they are hubs for a particular industry, the more they will see innovation and new blood migrating in. So if you are a whiz with finance, do you have no choice other than to live in New York? Will a smaller, quieter town never be on the cards for you? There are ways.
Small towns have assets in their universities, their businesses, and their capital. Their problem may be that they haven't grown up seeing themselves as potential business powerhouses that could create value out of nothing. The more every one of these facilities joins hands for cooperation and collaboration - businesses contributing to the learning institutions, the universities trying to improve the businesses in the area, and so on, the more they will become bigger than the sum of their parts. Just as the line separating work and leisure is blurring in the entrepreneurial centers of nation, so can the lines and between large and small towns. When the smaller urban centers in the country begin to truly strive to grow, business interests will absolutely begin the move back to the heartland. And then the job opportunities will come.
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