Freezing in NH

A recent Pew Research survey says that Americans feel like they’re stuck and not moving forward. 

Americans feel stuck in their tracks. A majority of survey respondents say that in the past five years, they either haven’t moved forward in life (25%) or have fallen backwards (31%). This is the most downbeat short-term assessment of personal progress in nearly half a century of polling by the Pew Research Center and the Gallup organization.

I think the housing mess is contributing to this, as is recent inflation.  I suspect if you asked this question two years ago the answer would be different.  People view losses as such a negative thing, for example if your house was valued at 100K when you bought it, rose to 180K and then fell to 120K, you feel much worse than if your house started at 100K, went to 110K and then to 120K.  You end up at the same spot but it feels bad to have something and lose it. 

Personally I feel stuck, but that is due to choices I’ve made, not outside forces.  I chose to drop the hours I work, and stay with my job when my company was sold.  I’m not sure that dropping my hours was a bad thing, but the point of dropping them was to spend the time fixing up the house I bought, and I’m still not done doing that.  Staying with the company was not necessarily a bad choice at the beginning, but it became obvious a while ago that I should be leaving.  So right now I’m stagnant in job duties and wages.  Five years ago I was working full time and making more, though I was in a more expensive area, so net-worth wise I’m ahead now.  But there are changes I need to make, and I’ve been putting them off.   So today I’m getting back in the game, sending out resumes and such.  Hopefully I can find something more interesting than what I’m doing now.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 8:02 am and is filed under articles, job hunt. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.