The Great Resignation is on blast

This is CNBC video on The Great Resignation, from yesterday, October 19, 2021.  As you have probably heard, millions of people have quit and resigned from their jobs over the past few months in 2021.  Since the Spring, about 20 million people have quit jobs.  

Disclaimer 

Depending who you listen to, about 20 million Americans have quit their jobs since either January or April.  August 2021 hit a record, with 4.3 million people quitting their jobs.  For context, there's about 160 million people counted in the "workforce," roughly the people aged 16-54 who have a job, or are recently unemployed (or were less than 6 months ago).  There are a whole bunch of reasons for so many people quitting, and the group of quitters is spread from low wage service jobs to high paying tech jobs.  

The biggest common denominator seems to be that millions of American workers are reassessing their lives, after the layoffs, shutdowns, and whatever the Covid-19 pandemic did to alter their daily activities on a personal level.  Tens of millions of people are trying to figure out what they want out of their lives, and what makes life most worth living.  

This is another aspect of the Big Freakin' Transition.  WE had millions of people who have struggled increasingly hard to maintain a standard of living, as pay lagged behind inflation for the last 30-40 years.  On the top end of the spectrum, plain old burnout, working too many hours, and high stress levels over extended periods of time seem to be more of a factor.  People across the spectrum of work in the U.S. are trying to find more compelling work, higher paying work, more meaningful work, and work with more flexibility.  This huge reshuffling is another part of old, Industrial Age systems and attitudes breaking down, and new, often tech enabled, attitudes, types of work, ways of working, and actual career paths, re-organizing, in an unexpected way.  

Honestly, this huge, unexpected reorganizing of work itself, is refreshing to see.  We have had a huge, growing mismatch of jobs that needed filled, and people looking for jobs.  We've had lots of people unemployed as well as lots of jobs we didn't have people with the right skills to fill.  The Great Resignation is that mismatch beginning to sort itself out.  It will keep going for several months, most likely, and perhaps the next 2 to 4 years.  This is people finding better work fits for their lives, and businesses finding better people for their jobs, and re-organizing how they operate, if they can't find people.  

I've been wondering why mainstream business media has become so vocal about The Great Resignation.  At the same time, content creators talking about a coming collapse of stocks, commodities, and real estate prices are being censored left and right on on social media and publishing platforms.  One possible reason for mainstream media pushing The Great Resignation narrative is that as long as lots of workers are quitting jobs, major layoffs are likely to happen near as much.  That's just a thought.  We'll see how this all plays out.  The Great Resignation isn't over.  It's something happening right now, and we'll see how it plays out over time. 

The Great Resignation- the latest phase of the populist uprising in the U.S.

I first heard about The Great Resignation in mid August, and wrote about it in a report I wrote in early September.  It's continuing.  According to this PBS report above, over 25 million Americans have quit their jobs since January 2021.  In a recession! (Which is technically a depression).  WTF is going on?  I have a pretty good idea.  But I'm an amateur futurist, I've had a head start at all this.

Disclaimer

I've been blogging about economic and work-related issues since mid-2017 (like this post from June 28, 2017).  I saw a very serious economic downturn coming our way, even back then.  But as an amateur futurist who was keeping an eye on some ultra long term cycles playing out, I saw more than just another recession coming, or even another "Great Recession."  

Since late 1989 I've been watching a theory, a concept play out, called The Law of Social Cycle, by a mid-20th century thinker from India, named P.R. Sarkar.  In late January 2020, before Covid-19 was close to hitting U.S. shores, I wrote a chapter in my 20 chapter online book/blog thing about this theory.  In part, that theory, analyzed for the U.S. by economist Ravi Batra, predicted a major, long term, populist uprising in the United States.  My 12th chapter in this online book/blog, written 20 months ago, in the last paragraph says, "...but the Laborer class are still rising, and will force massive change at some point.  This is not even close to over."  That's at the end of my explanation, of my understanding, of P.R. Sarkar's Law of Social Cycle.  You can read that chapter (or skip to the last paragraph) here.  

After reading about this theory in late 1989, and watching much of what Batra predicted play out in the early 1990's, I believed that a MAJOR populist uprising, a wide scale "worker's revolt," of some type, would happen in the U.S. years in the future.  I believe it started with the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, and rose up again in the support for both populist candidates, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, on the Left and the Right, in the 2016 election.  

But I knew there was more to come. Life for average American workers has been going downhill for 30-40 years.  It has simply been getting harder and harder to make a good living, and raise a family well.  A time of reckoning was coming.  

And that is just one part of the major changes I saw coming, according to the thinking of Alvin and Heidi Toffler (last two blog posts), P.R. Sarkar (this post), and also Richard Florida (more on his Creative Class concept, in future posts).  

In late 2019, I tagged this decade as The Tumultuous 2020's.  There are a whole lot of reasons why, and that's what this blog is for.  Simply put, there are all kinds of societal changes that need to take place, on virtually every level, for human society to move forward.  The major cycles and concepts I've watched for years, even decades, all started converging as we headed into the 2020's.  It's like they were all heading for major transitions, major inflection points, at the same time.  That made me think, "Oh shit."  

There's a lot going on, and it's NOT the crazy conspiracy stuff many people are hearing from bad media and worse websites and stupid friends.  We have all kinds of relatively new technology that makes whole new lifestyles possible, and society itself needs to catch up, and integrate all this technology into lifestyles that work for real humans.  In a sense, we all need to upgrade the world to fit the tech and lifestyles and other issues (economic, climate, social injustice, political, etc) going on in our world.  

It seems the time has come to remodel... the whole freakin' world.  Really.  

There's a lot more to come.  I've been blogging about this big group of inter-related ideas for four years now.  Now that what I've seen coming is partly visible to most people, I've got a lot to say on where we're at as human society, and where we're headed.  Then you can decided what, if any, of my ideas, make sense in your lives.  Then it's time to figure out how we all live in today's world in a more functional way.