"Every socioeconomic system also generates an underlying myth, a story that defines the possibilities and the obligations of life in that particular time and place. The American myth, fostered by a seemingly inexhaustible supply of apparently free land, is the story of starting with nothing and ending up with the comfort, affluence, and security. Its psychic dimension is the story of starting out as nobody and ending up as somebody. For the first two centuries after European settlers arrived on these shores, the story involved a place and a state of mind called the frontier. However discouraging one’s present situation was, there was always the frontier. There you could begin over again. There, all accounts reverted to zero. There, all people toed the same starting line. There, yesterday’s loser might be tomorrow’s winner.

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In a famous paper read to the American Historical Association meeting in 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner announced that the frontier was gone. Population densities had increased to the point where there were no longer significant blocks of unsettled land left. But the frontier remained a fact of the imagination in America long after it ceased to exist on any map. It survived partly because myths are rooted in a deeper psychic level that population figures can reach. But it also survived because it had imperceptibly blended with another story that was better grounded in the facts of the late nineteenth century. That other story, likewise, traced the path from poverty to wealth and obscurity to fame. That later story was the rages to riches tale of the young man who started with a modest job and did so well at it that he was promoted. . . and promoted again. . . and again until he because the boss of the whole show.

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Without missing a beat, the American myth left behind the frontier and moved to the bank, the store, or the factory. And in its new incarnation, the myth transformed the old promise into new terms: wealth was still limitless and access to it was still universal, but now it involved a job and not a piece of land. Anyone could begin with any job and work his way up to the top. Jobs became the stepping stones for social advancement and personal fulfillment.

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To get a job was to plug in to the system through which wealth was distributed in American society. To expand the pool of that wealth, the society simply needed to keep generating new jobs. It was true that periodic recessions caused the job level to fall temporarily, but as with any rising tide, the ebb was always followed by a greater flow. Like recessions, the gradual mechanization of American work took away jobs too. But the huge expansion of consumer markets offset those losses, and the tide kept rising.

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Until now. For reasons detailed in the first chapters of this book, the tide has turned and jobs that are disappearing are not being replaced. As we saw, that does not mean that no work remains that needs doing. On the contrary, work needing to be done is all around us, but it is no longer so easy to box it into "jobs."

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Job seekers send out hundreds of resumes and they answer job ads in droves, but they report that the jobs are all taken. Then, they try again. And again. They respond to the unconscious pull of the old mythic story that says that the job is the gateway to success, and they keep responding to it long after the jobs have disappeared--just as people kept looking for the frontier way of life long after there was no frontier actually left.

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Losing a core social myth of this sort is much harder than losing any number of jobs: it undermines the very reality that people live in. The world doesn’t feel the same any longer, and people don’t feel at home in it. The shadows seem longer and the wind seems colder. People feel exposed and lost and confused. The floss of the job myth marks one of those dividing lines in history that makes an earlier period seem in retrospect to have been simpler and easier to live in--simpler even than the past really was. You can be sure that we will look back on the age of jobs in the same way that people of a century ago looked back at the world of the frontier farm. We will idealize it. Nothing makes it so clear that something is passing than the aura of meaning and comfort that begins to surround it like a halo of warmth and light. A telltale sign of the transition is the sense of mourning and disorientation that we feel as we grapple with the fact that jobs really are going away.

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Source: William Bridges, Job Shift: How to Prospect in a Workplace without Jobs (Addison Wesley Publishing; 1994), pp. 198-201.