...that I encountered over the years, in various conversations:
"But those jobs have always been badly paid."
(In response to my mentioning wage-scale collapse -- and in fact that's not true, many jobs are comparable with payscales with jobs like being a high school teacher or being in lower-level higher ed admin or what you can find in a lot of non-profits, only you can hop around a little more between different roles, once you get established, and these jobs are everywhere, so why not opt for a sector with more mobility, especially if you like it.)
"Healthcare has been hanging by a thread for a long time."
(In response to my shaking my head about the short-staffing at the last job that I had in that sector right before I quit -- which short-staffing was shocking since there's definitely a known dynamic of bad for-profit places versus "the better ones," but this was at a place with a great reputation that had let itself slide, to just a shocking degree.)
"These are human beings we're talking about."
(When I was talking with an old [academic] colleague and I was detailing the short-staffing and how you don't want to put yourself in a workplace with that with the tension and the liability, since everything just starts to smell like lawsuits -- um, that kind of treatment of human beings is already "baked in the cake" and known to happen a ton at the bad for-profit places, I just kind of accept that and take that for granted in any conversation about the sector that I ever have, here I'm talking about my specific decision to be/stay involved or not at one specific workplace, though I guess if you feel that strongly about it, *you* go work there or a place like that, if you can't find another cross to go throw yourself on.)
"Can't you find another kind of job with that?"
(Yes I could in the area -- but it's become a fact even acknowledged in the local papers that it's a strange hole that's developed in a 45-min radius or so, so even if I moved into something like "power of attorney" for people -- something I'd considered in the past as a possible path into a higher paygrade! -- I wouldn't be directly involved per se, but you'd have to tell people and families that there are truly no good options, and why would you put yourself through that? Alternately, do you expect me to pick up stakes and move again, to a whole 'nother area, especially when restaurant work is increasingly kind of equivalent to what I'd get in that "profession," due to wage inflation?)
. . .
Overall, after I decided to move from the city that I had lived in because of safety and financial reasons and public transportation reliability, too, I'd scoped out the market, found a good local employer, and secured a job there, only to discover they'd recently, quickly changed for the worse, and at that point, what can you do? It's a smaller town compared to a city, and in some ways, that makes you kind of stuck. And, because the pandemic kind of put everything on hold for the span of a few years just when I'd started to look around at moving up professionally within eldercare but had not yet done so, and then I moved and had to reconfigure (again), it's just so many years wasted, again, with nothing professionally to show for it. Really, at some point I feel like I just have to chalk up ever having a profession -- too many wasted years in directions that didn't pay off, and if I haven't had anything through investment of time and effort by this point, it won't happen now through my own effort, it'll be very random and through luck instead, and you'd be silly to keep wasting all that energy trying to make something work (again).
Part of me almost feels like I'm those rats who will no longer push a lever for a treat, it's like I have learned helplessness with "the job market," but on the other hand, the marked decline of any number of interlinked and even separate employment sectors just seems to be a *fact*, not something in my head, there's multiple news stories about this concrete stuff I've seen, and, that said, I do keep my eyes open and talk to people, I just can't figure out anything where it seems decently pleasant enough and I'd have a decent chance enough of securing it through a reasonable amount of effort.
Just an endless, eternal frustration, going on for over a decade now.
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