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My generaton(1944-1969) was the first which made many career changes and the next two generations(1969-1994) and (1994-2019) will make even more. The following is some of my story and how I both precipitated and survived the changes. This post is somewhat long and I advise readers to simply stop reading when the exercise proves irrelevant or too long-winded for their purposes.-Ron Price, Australia
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LETTER WRITING: 2 JOB APPLICATIONS A WEEK
FOR 50 YEARS---JOB HUNTING 1957-2007
The information and details in my resume, a resume I no longer need in the job-hunting world after fifty years of use, should help anyone wanting to know something about my personal and professional background, my writing and my life. This resume might be useful, in some residual capacity, for the few who want to assess my suitability for some advertised or unadvertised employment position which, I must emphasize again, I never apply for anymore. I stopped applying for full-time jobs in September 2007 and part-time ones in December 2003. I also disengaged myself from most volunteer or casual work three years ago in 2005.
At the age of 64, then, on the eve of the Australian Old Age Pension I have become, self-employed as a writer-poet, an independent scholar. I have gradually come to this role in the years after I left full-time employment in 1999, nine years ago. Not being occupied with earning a living and giving myself to 60 hours a week in a job and many other hours to community activity, as I had been for so many years, marked a turning point in my life. I became able to devote my time to a much more extensive involvement in writing and reading material of my own choice.
Writing is for most of its votaries a solitary, hopefully stimulating, but not always pleasurable leisure-time, part-time or full-time pursuit. In my case in these first years(60-65) of late adulthood(60-80), writing has become full-time about 60 hours a week. And this activity is, for the most part, an enriching and enjoyable pursuit. I have replaced my former paid employment and extensive activity with people in community with a form of work which is also a form of leisure, namely: writing and reading—independent scholarship.
Inevitably the style of one's writing and what one reads is a reflection of the person, their experience and their philosophy. On occasion, I set out a summary of my writing, my employment experience, my resume, in an attachment to this brief essay, this introductory statement, this commentary on the job application process which occupied my life for over four decades. If, as that famous although not always highly regarded psychologist, Carl Jung, writes: we are what we do, then some of what I was and am could and can be found in that attachment, that resume and its several appendices. That document may seem over-the-top as they say these days since it now occupies nearly 30 pages and many more pages if the appendices are also included.
Half a century of various forms of employment as well as community, leisure and volunteer activity in the professional and not-so-professional world, all this time in many places produced a great pile of what used to be called one's curriculum vitae, one's CV, one's bio-data. As I say, I make the list of this stuff available to readers of this account when appropriate, when requested and, occasionally, when not appropriate. I update those many pages to include recent writing projects I have completed or am in the process of completing during these first years of my retirement from full-time, part-time and most volunteer activity.
My resume has always been the piece of writing, the statement, the document, the entry ticket which has opened up the possibilities of another adventure, another bit of gadding about, another slice of a quasi-pioneering-peripatetic existence of moving from town to town, to another state or country, to another location, to work in another organization, to an entry to another portion of my life. I'm sure that will also be the case in the years of my late adulthood(60-80) and old age(80++) should, for some reason, movement to yet another place or, indeed, from place to place be necessary to continue for some reason I can not, as yet, anticipate. This continued movement, though, seems highly unlikely as I go through these early years(60-65) of late adulthood and head into the last stages of my life, from sunset and early evening to night's first hours and then, finally, the last hours of night, the final syllables of my recorded time. This rite de passage expressed in the form of yet another job in another place seems to have come to an end. Time, of course, will tell.
In the last four years(60-64) which are, as I indicate, the first ones of late adulthood, a period developmental psychologists call the years from 60 to 80; and in this first decade of my retirement(1999 to 2009), I have been able to write to a much greater extent than I had ever been able to do in those years of my early(1965-1984) and middle(1984-1999) adulthood when job, family and the demands of various community projects kept my nose to the grindstone as they say colloquially in many parts of the world.
With the final unloading of much of the volunteer work which I took on when I first retired, in the years from 1999 to 2005; with the gradual cessation of virtually the entire apparatus and process of job-application by 2007; with my last child having left home in 2005; with a more settled home environment than I've ever had by 2007 and with a new medication for the bipolar disorder that afflicted my life since my teens, also by 2007, the remaining years of my late adulthood beckon bright with promise. My resume reflects the shift in role, in my lifespan activity-base and lists the many writing projects I've been able to complete in this first decade of independent scholarship and full-time writing.
The process of frequent moves and frequent jobs which was my pattern for forty years, 1949 to 1999, is not everyone's style, modus operandi or modus vivendi. Many millions of people live and die in the same town, city or state and their life's adventure takes place within that physical region, the confines of a relatively small place and, perhaps, a very few jobs in their lifetime. Physical movement is not essential to psychological and spiritual growth, nor is a long list of jobs, although a great degree of inner change, extensive inner shifting, is inevitable from a person's teens through to their late adulthood. This is even more true in the recent decades of modern time at this climacteric of history. For many millions of people during the half century 1957 to 2007, my years of being jobbed and applying for jobs, the world was their oyster, not so much in the manner of a tourist, although there was plenty of that, but rather in terms of working lives which came to be seen increasingly in a global context.
This was true for me during those years when I was looking for amusement, education and experience, some stimulating vocation and avocation, some employment security and comfort, my adventurous years in a new form of pioneering, globe-trotting, pathfinding of sorts, as part of history's long story, my applying-for-job days, some five decades from the 1950s to the first decade of the new millennium. My resume altered many times, of course, during those fifty years. It is now, for the most part and as I indicated above, not used in these years of my retirement and especially since 2007, except as an information and bio-data vehicle for interested readers, 99.9% of whom are on the internet at its plethora of sites.
This document, as I say above, a document that used to be called my curriculum vitae or my CV, is a useful backdrop for those examining my writing, especially my poetry. Some poets and writers, artists and creative people in many fields, though, regard their CV, resume, bio-data, lifeline, life-story, life-narrative, personal background as irrelevant, simply not necessary for people to know, in order for them to appreciate their work. These people take the position that they are not what they do or, to put it a little differently and a little more succinctly, "they are not their jobs."
I frequently use this resume at various internet locations on the World Wide Web when I want to provide some introductory background on myself; I could list many new uses after decades of a use which had a multifactorial motivational base: to help me get a job, to get a new job, to help me make more money, to enrich my experience and to add something refreshing to my life as it was becoming increasingly stale in the day-to-day grind, to help me get away from supervisors and from situations I could not handle or were a cause of great stress, to help me flee from settings where my health was preventing me from continuing successfully in my job, to engage in new forms of adventure, pioneering, amusement, indeed, to help me survive life's tests in the myriad forms that afflict the embattled spirit, et cetera, et cetera.
The use of the resume always saved me from having to reinvent the wheel, so to speak. One could photocopy it and mail it out with the covering letter to anyone and everyone. The photocopier became a common feature of the commerical, business and government world in the 1960s just as I began to send out the first of the literally thousands of job applications that I would over the next forty years: 1967-2007. One didn't have to write the application out each time; one did not have to "say it again Sam" in resume after resume to the point of utter tedium.
Applying for jobs as extensively as I did in the days before the email and the internet became, though, an activity sometimes resembling a dry-wretch. Four to five thousand job applications from 1957 to 2007 is a lot of applications! At least since the mid-1990s, a few clicks of one's personal electronic-computer system and some aspect of life's game can go on or can come to a quick end over a set of wires under the ground, the electronic world of cyberspace. During that half-century of job-hunting years I applied, as I say, for some four to five thousand jobs, an average of two a week for each of all those years! This is a guesstimation, of course, as accurate a guesstimation as I can calculate for this fifty year period. The great bulk, 99.9% of those thousands of letters involved in this vast, detailed and, from time to time, exhausting and frustrating process, I did not keep. I did keep a small handful of them, perhaps half a dozen of all those letters, in a file in my Letters: Section VII, Sub-Section X, a part of my autobiographical work which is now entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs.
This autobiographical work Pioneering Over Four Epochs goes for 2600 pages in five volumes and, due to its length, will not likely be read while I occupy space on this mortal coil. Much of my autobiography, portions of it, are now found, though, on the internet at a multitude of sites where in nano-micro-seconds anyone can find portions of my writing. I am known in a multitude of microcosms, microworlds, miniworlds, where neither name nor fame can reach me, and where all the problems that go with any degree of celebrity status in our fame-hungry world will pass me by into cyberspace, into an electronic ether.
Given the thousands of hours over so many years devoted to the job-hunting process; given the importance of this key to my venture across two continents, two marriages, with at least two personalities being the bipolar person that I am; given that this new style of pioneering, voyaging-via-employment venture in our time has been at the core of my life with so much that has radiated around this core; given the amount of paper produced, the amount of energy expended and the amount of money earned and spent in this great exercise of survival; given the amount of writing done in the context of those various jobs, some of this employment-related correspondence seemed to warrant a corner in the written story of my life.
It seemed appropriate, at least it was my desire as I entered the years when I no longer applied for jobs, to write this short statement fitting all those thousands of unkept resumes and job-applications into a larger context as well as all those letters, emails and internet posts written in connection with trying to make connections with others, into some larger framework of action and meaning. For those who would like to read more on this theme I invite them to go to the internet site Baha'i Library Online>Secondary Source Material>Personal Letters>The Letters of RonPrice: 1957-2007.
-----------------------------------------
LETTER WRITING: 2 JOB APPLICATIONS A WEEK
FOR 50 YEARS---JOB HUNTING 1957-2007
The information and details in my resume, a resume I no longer need in the job-hunting world after fifty years of use, should help anyone wanting to know something about my personal and professional background, my writing and my life. This resume might be useful, in some residual capacity, for the few who want to assess my suitability for some advertised or unadvertised employment position which, I must emphasize again, I never apply for anymore. I stopped applying for full-time jobs in September 2007 and part-time ones in December 2003. I also disengaged myself from most volunteer or casual work three years ago in 2005.
At the age of 64, then, on the eve of the Australian Old Age Pension I have become, self-employed as a writer-poet, an independent scholar. I have gradually come to this role in the years after I left full-time employment in 1999, nine years ago. Not being occupied with earning a living and giving myself to 60 hours a week in a job and many other hours to community activity, as I had been for so many years, marked a turning point in my life. I became able to devote my time to a much more extensive involvement in writing and reading material of my own choice.
Writing is for most of its votaries a solitary, hopefully stimulating, but not always pleasurable leisure-time, part-time or full-time pursuit. In my case in these first years(60-65) of late adulthood(60-80), writing has become full-time about 60 hours a week. And this activity is, for the most part, an enriching and enjoyable pursuit. I have replaced my former paid employment and extensive activity with people in community with a form of work which is also a form of leisure, namely: writing and reading—independent scholarship.
Inevitably the style of one's writing and what one reads is a reflection of the person, their experience and their philosophy. On occasion, I set out a summary of my writing, my employment experience, my resume, in an attachment to this brief essay, this introductory statement, this commentary on the job application process which occupied my life for over four decades. If, as that famous although not always highly regarded psychologist, Carl Jung, writes: we are what we do, then some of what I was and am could and can be found in that attachment, that resume and its several appendices. That document may seem over-the-top as they say these days since it now occupies nearly 30 pages and many more pages if the appendices are also included.
Half a century of various forms of employment as well as community, leisure and volunteer activity in the professional and not-so-professional world, all this time in many places produced a great pile of what used to be called one's curriculum vitae, one's CV, one's bio-data. As I say, I make the list of this stuff available to readers of this account when appropriate, when requested and, occasionally, when not appropriate. I update those many pages to include recent writing projects I have completed or am in the process of completing during these first years of my retirement from full-time, part-time and most volunteer activity.
My resume has always been the piece of writing, the statement, the document, the entry ticket which has opened up the possibilities of another adventure, another bit of gadding about, another slice of a quasi-pioneering-peripatetic existence of moving from town to town, to another state or country, to another location, to work in another organization, to an entry to another portion of my life. I'm sure that will also be the case in the years of my late adulthood(60-80) and old age(80++) should, for some reason, movement to yet another place or, indeed, from place to place be necessary to continue for some reason I can not, as yet, anticipate. This continued movement, though, seems highly unlikely as I go through these early years(60-65) of late adulthood and head into the last stages of my life, from sunset and early evening to night's first hours and then, finally, the last hours of night, the final syllables of my recorded time. This rite de passage expressed in the form of yet another job in another place seems to have come to an end. Time, of course, will tell.
In the last four years(60-64) which are, as I indicate, the first ones of late adulthood, a period developmental psychologists call the years from 60 to 80; and in this first decade of my retirement(1999 to 2009), I have been able to write to a much greater extent than I had ever been able to do in those years of my early(1965-1984) and middle(1984-1999) adulthood when job, family and the demands of various community projects kept my nose to the grindstone as they say colloquially in many parts of the world.
With the final unloading of much of the volunteer work which I took on when I first retired, in the years from 1999 to 2005; with the gradual cessation of virtually the entire apparatus and process of job-application by 2007; with my last child having left home in 2005; with a more settled home environment than I've ever had by 2007 and with a new medication for the bipolar disorder that afflicted my life since my teens, also by 2007, the remaining years of my late adulthood beckon bright with promise. My resume reflects the shift in role, in my lifespan activity-base and lists the many writing projects I've been able to complete in this first decade of independent scholarship and full-time writing.
The process of frequent moves and frequent jobs which was my pattern for forty years, 1949 to 1999, is not everyone's style, modus operandi or modus vivendi. Many millions of people live and die in the same town, city or state and their life's adventure takes place within that physical region, the confines of a relatively small place and, perhaps, a very few jobs in their lifetime. Physical movement is not essential to psychological and spiritual growth, nor is a long list of jobs, although a great degree of inner change, extensive inner shifting, is inevitable from a person's teens through to their late adulthood. This is even more true in the recent decades of modern time at this climacteric of history. For many millions of people during the half century 1957 to 2007, my years of being jobbed and applying for jobs, the world was their oyster, not so much in the manner of a tourist, although there was plenty of that, but rather in terms of working lives which came to be seen increasingly in a global context.
This was true for me during those years when I was looking for amusement, education and experience, some stimulating vocation and avocation, some employment security and comfort, my adventurous years in a new form of pioneering, globe-trotting, pathfinding of sorts, as part of history's long story, my applying-for-job days, some five decades from the 1950s to the first decade of the new millennium. My resume altered many times, of course, during those fifty years. It is now, for the most part and as I indicated above, not used in these years of my retirement and especially since 2007, except as an information and bio-data vehicle for interested readers, 99.9% of whom are on the internet at its plethora of sites.
This document, as I say above, a document that used to be called my curriculum vitae or my CV, is a useful backdrop for those examining my writing, especially my poetry. Some poets and writers, artists and creative people in many fields, though, regard their CV, resume, bio-data, lifeline, life-story, life-narrative, personal background as irrelevant, simply not necessary for people to know, in order for them to appreciate their work. These people take the position that they are not what they do or, to put it a little differently and a little more succinctly, "they are not their jobs."
I frequently use this resume at various internet locations on the World Wide Web when I want to provide some introductory background on myself; I could list many new uses after decades of a use which had a multifactorial motivational base: to help me get a job, to get a new job, to help me make more money, to enrich my experience and to add something refreshing to my life as it was becoming increasingly stale in the day-to-day grind, to help me get away from supervisors and from situations I could not handle or were a cause of great stress, to help me flee from settings where my health was preventing me from continuing successfully in my job, to engage in new forms of adventure, pioneering, amusement, indeed, to help me survive life's tests in the myriad forms that afflict the embattled spirit, et cetera, et cetera.
The use of the resume always saved me from having to reinvent the wheel, so to speak. One could photocopy it and mail it out with the covering letter to anyone and everyone. The photocopier became a common feature of the commerical, business and government world in the 1960s just as I began to send out the first of the literally thousands of job applications that I would over the next forty years: 1967-2007. One didn't have to write the application out each time; one did not have to "say it again Sam" in resume after resume to the point of utter tedium.
Applying for jobs as extensively as I did in the days before the email and the internet became, though, an activity sometimes resembling a dry-wretch. Four to five thousand job applications from 1957 to 2007 is a lot of applications! At least since the mid-1990s, a few clicks of one's personal electronic-computer system and some aspect of life's game can go on or can come to a quick end over a set of wires under the ground, the electronic world of cyberspace. During that half-century of job-hunting years I applied, as I say, for some four to five thousand jobs, an average of two a week for each of all those years! This is a guesstimation, of course, as accurate a guesstimation as I can calculate for this fifty year period. The great bulk, 99.9% of those thousands of letters involved in this vast, detailed and, from time to time, exhausting and frustrating process, I did not keep. I did keep a small handful of them, perhaps half a dozen of all those letters, in a file in my Letters: Section VII, Sub-Section X, a part of my autobiographical work which is now entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs.
This autobiographical work Pioneering Over Four Epochs goes for 2600 pages in five volumes and, due to its length, will not likely be read while I occupy space on this mortal coil. Much of my autobiography, portions of it, are now found, though, on the internet at a multitude of sites where in nano-micro-seconds anyone can find portions of my writing. I am known in a multitude of microcosms, microworlds, miniworlds, where neither name nor fame can reach me, and where all the problems that go with any degree of celebrity status in our fame-hungry world will pass me by into cyberspace, into an electronic ether.
Given the thousands of hours over so many years devoted to the job-hunting process; given the importance of this key to my venture across two continents, two marriages, with at least two personalities being the bipolar person that I am; given that this new style of pioneering, voyaging-via-employment venture in our time has been at the core of my life with so much that has radiated around this core; given the amount of paper produced, the amount of energy expended and the amount of money earned and spent in this great exercise of survival; given the amount of writing done in the context of those various jobs, some of this employment-related correspondence seemed to warrant a corner in the written story of my life.
It seemed appropriate, at least it was my desire as I entered the years when I no longer applied for jobs, to write this short statement fitting all those thousands of unkept resumes and job-applications into a larger context as well as all those letters, emails and internet posts written in connection with trying to make connections with others, into some larger framework of action and meaning. For those who would like to read more on this theme I invite them to go to the internet site Baha'i Library Online>Secondary Source Material>Personal Letters>The Letters of RonPrice: 1957-2007.
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