Today I lost a job. This is better than losing a life. Work is love though. Love is life, and today it is predicted that we will lose 100000 lives in the USA if all goes well.
This job loss isn't that different than the multitude of jobs and contracts I have lost in the past. There is one difference though. This job would have helped people. It was also one of the larger jobs I had found, dug, formed for my company and those that work with me.
This project was where I wanted to go. It challenged us to create something for the public good. Fuck SEO... this would be a tool to help families help families. If done correctly it would be a seamless, background part of hundreds of people's lives. It would have been in multiple languages. We would have struggled, and failed, and learned a ton.
In the end we would have developed something that could be much better but was much better than what was before. Progress. Learning. A gentle nudge away from technology as a better profit rail to technology as something to help. Sure it is all grand and sophomoric but fuck, I need to try. And honestly it has been working.
But not now... Our funding was halted, diverted to address the widespread health emergency consuming the world and our country. How frail we are. How unprepared for a virus with 1-2% mortality we are. How completely inefficient we are.
I feel a draw to make the public good, better. I believe we are as people generally good. But in a country lacking clear leadership and the means to implement action, that good only reaches so far. We are good but grossly unprepared. We assume the best will come and then don't plan for anything else. We invest in our small personal future instead of building the fabric of our society. We expect what is ours and the best to you and yours.
I can't help but feel that this cancel, this job loss more than others, is a result of exactly what I want to address. The augmentation we had planned for years was halted by the lack of augmentation and foundational planning that has been going on for years.
I hope we recover. I hope I survive. I hope we find more work or that this project returns. Beyond these small concerns though, I feel that this cannot go on. I must find a way to work, and work to do, to help ensure that the next pandemic doesn't set us so far back and stop us from doing the work that needs to be done.