GETTING TO NORMAL
Seeking a sense of normalcy may be one of the most common driving forces of human nature. However, we differ among ourselves as to what makes up normal, and normal itself changes over time.
After decades of never going near a hospital except to visit a recovering friend or family member, I found myself on the receiving end of a surgical knife. It was one of those ‘kick in the groin’ male operations that many of us guys experience in our lives. Fortunately, the pre-op went smoothly, the anesthesiologist was super, and the procedure was a success. Of course, it left me with a few painful and very uncomfortable days of hospital recovery, followed by curtailed activity and a regimen of physical therapy while mending.
As if my physician expected my question, he cleared me to go home with a farewell that included: “Continue your therapy routines and you should be back to normal within a few weeks. Here’s a prescription for pills to control the pain while you bounce back. Take ‘em if you need ‘em, but not in greater dosages than I’ve prescribed.”
That’s my only experience with using opioid-based pain medication. Not so, for many in America today who are hurting physically, emotionally or economically and whose common goal is to get back to normal.
For many of us today, getting back to normal is a plea that emergency medical personnel hear all too frequently from opioid overdose victims, that is, from those whom they successfully bring back to consciousness. “I didn’t want to get high, I just wanted to get rid of the pain. I just wanted to feel normal again.”
The pharmaceutical industry has effectively incorporated getting to normal into its advertising messages. Whether it’s our constricted bowels or our congested sinuses, the messaging is clear: “We have a remedy for that,” usually a prescribed or over-the-counter drug to help make us normal again!
Patient: “Doctor, I’m hurting, and I just want to feel OK again.”
Doctor: “I’ve got a pill for that.”
The danger is that such messaging has lulled many of us into complacency and, some experts argue, has enabled bad habits and self-destructive behavior that ends up in drug overdose. For many the American Dream, however we choose to define it, is beyond reach. The causes for this feeling are many: job insecurity, low pay, accumulating debt, lack of affordable housing in a safe neighborhood. As a result, drugs become a tempting way to overcome the sense of depression brought on by struggles just to live a normal life.
During the last half of the 20th century, normal was easy to define: a steady job, a small but affordable house with a car outside and a dad, mom, kids, and dog or cat inside. The relative certainty of a dependable job and a reasonable salary provided a reliable opportunity for making that normal a reality for the bulk of American families.
‘Normal’ today, however, is a moving target. That’s partly because missing from the normal equation is a certain ease of upward mobility that many Americans enjoyed in the past and had become conditioned to expect. Knowledge has evolved so rapidly, for example, that kids’ high school math and biology textbooks today are more complex than even their parents’ college texts. Parents find themselves unequipped to assist their children with their homework.
In the workplace, fewer employees can expect to retire from the company which first hired them. Firms’ loyalties have shifted from their employees to their stockholders. The urgency of reporting short-term earnings gains in the next quarterly report overshadows any long-term efforts to cultivate a committed and adequately compensated workforce. So stockholders pressure corporate leaders to trim back the number of their employees and automate their functions.
John or Jane Doe at one time could count on Widgets, Inc. to provide them steady jobs, even advancement toward a full 25- to 30-year career with the firm. Now to survive, they must be John or Jane Doe, Inc. selling their technical expertise or labor services, as if they themselves were micro-enterprises. But they have diminishing market bargaining power with larger firms unwilling to commit to contracting them for more than a few years and limiting the retirement benefits that come with career employment.
This is the new(est) normal. The one-employer career and home-with-picket-fence lifestyles are becoming more the exception than the rule. This “new normal” is even more difficult to attain because of what psychologists and economists call social and market “rigidities.” Our lives are more closely tethered to our communities than we recognize. We don’t always notice that community affinity until we discover that to earn income in increasingly competitive labor markets, we need to relocate to where corporate investment and job growth are taking place. This requires leaving behind the civic organizations and social networks in which we have taken part and which have helped define and support us.
This “social capital,” as economists describe it, dissipates when we drift away from our community and family support networks to find work in new locations. When we pull up stakes, we find ourselves not only in unfamiliar jobs and workplaces but also without that familiar community support. Putting down new roots means the stressful task of finding a new normal. Staying put, we risk joblessness and financial hardship. Neither of these two options feels good.
Under such conditions, ‘normal’ becomes elusive, often unattainable, and only a distant enticing memory about how good things were in the stable and comfortable community- and family-bound past as compared to the evolving world of fluid labor markets. This uneasiness about what is ‘normal’ today has three principal causes:
Technological advances introduce new and challenging workplace conditions and job requirements;
Greater cultural diversity demands more understanding and acceptance of those who differ from us; and
Bureaucratic government agencies and profit-maximizing private corporations are too often unresponsive to our needs for temporary social safety net support in times of need.
There’s no remedy, no magic pill to help us manage this new normal of change. Those ill equipped to address change often turn to artificial supports when faced with unfamiliar change. Many of those affected by America’s opioid epidemic have experienced a sense of marginalization or loss of steady work at living wages adversely impact self-esteem. That in turn leads to drug use or alcohol consumption, which reduces job dependability, affecting reliability of income and producing further anxiety and despair.
Banks may declare, “We’ve got a credit card for that!” Easy credit may solve short-run consumption needs but eventually can create unmanageable financial burdens from which it is difficult to escape. Combined, these overwhelming outcomes of deteriorating self-esteem, health and finances lead to mental and physical breakdowns that put a return to any sense of normalcy totally out of reach.
Some big pharma companies have been enablers of today’s opioid epidemic by fostering a chemical approach to getting back to normal. But they are not the cause. The inducements that lead to falling short of normal - e.g., destructive addictions, substance abuse, over spending or under saving - are stronger today than the incentives and support for achieving getting to normal.
Owning a home appears out of reach for increasing numbers of adults because wage growth has lagged housing prices. Mounting college debt has left many young workers with no net equity to finance a home purchase. These, among other economic forces, make it harder for younger generations to build the wealth needed to overcome hard times or achieve a comfortable retirement. It’s easy to understand why a sense of frustration, defeat, and depression can set in.
So, how can we cultivate incentives and equip ourselves and our children to achieve and manage the new normal of change? Lifestyle improvement experts have proposed and debated scores of remedies. This writer proposes three ways that we can take to navigate a changing future. These three steps each involve resurrecting values and practices that have served us well in other times of difficult transition. Among them are:
Restore a sense of value to things that have no price. We live in a market economy and as such we tend to equate the value of things with their price. Most of us can come fairly close to estimating the price of an SUV, a smartphone or a cable TV subscription. But there are things of value in our lives that don’t have an easily calculable or estimated price. What’s the cost of clean air, safe streets, keeping libraries open for more hours, or simply spending quality time playing board games around the kitchen table with family? Because most of us realistically can’t put a price on them, these “priceless” things of value get squeezed out of our consciousness and become overlooked and abandoned.
Let’s restore things of value to more important places in our lives and avoid spending on those items that don’t. The benefits can be huge if we invest in things of value in our lives. Less money spent on material wants, instead of needs, means greater financial solvency in later life, or of genuine need, e.g., ill health, job loss, housing, or job equipping. More quality time with family or community means stronger social interactions and spiritual connections to support us when we need them. Healthier relationships provide better chances of making informed decisions based on credible sources about schooling, marriage, children, housing and retirement, all of which are contributors to building strong families and supportive communities.
Strengthen and protect the basic institutions of family and community. Let’s advocate for the roles of family and community in our lives. Public services are important in true safety net situations, such as recovering from natural disasters or dislocations from major economic downturns. But it is in our nuclear families and local communities where the best nurturing and support reside. Government services certainly can help strengthen family and community, but seldom warrant displacing them.
Youth in particular will benefit. Of the two-thirds of the day that kids aren’t sleeping, they pass one-third of that time with family and one-third with community – friends, adult role models, part-time jobs for local businesses, etc. Federal and state government can help restore and strengthen family and community with tax and spending policies including strong, reliable safety nets to help those experiencing economic disruptions or natural disasters. Government can help restore normalcy without declaring what it would be or what it should look like. That determination is the role of participants in free market democracies.
Budget sufficient public funding for universal education and public service. Plenty has been written about the critical need to invest more in our schools and teachers. More needs to be said about increasing opportunities for public service or paid apprenticeship programs for youth as they transition from school to work. Americans’ need for public services is huge, whether it be in the military defending our country, in conservation corps tasked with protecting and stewarding our environment and natural resources, in participating in technical teams expanding digital infrastructure and services to every corner of the country, or in providing health or companion services to the very young and old.
With investments in those public services, our country reaps the dividends of building appreciation for community and civic duty. Youth also learn the value of teamwork while gaining skills that will help them address the challenges they can expect to encounter in the course of their lives.
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When Americans are out of sorts, we strive to return to our normal routines. If one wheel comes off our wagon, we’re wired to repair or replace it, and then get back on the road to normalcy. To keep the wheels from falling off the wagon for this new generation of Americans, let’s build a can-do culture of skilled, capable and confident young citizens equipped to respond rationally and responsibly to the new normal of change.
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