A job lost, but not a job gained

Talking to a friend after a year or so makes many things hard to explain; how mutual priorities are distant now, as if they only were a priority conditioned to mutuality. How we’re in the city we are in, how we are not in one we were a year ago. How it all adds up to the residue of identity we are left with, of each other. The hardest of course, is to explain and understand the exclusivity of near physical reunion in all this. All of this in a pre-pandemic world.  

In the post-pandemic world however, the hardest to explain is how one lost his job. Losing a job is losing it to someone. Losing a job to a pandemic is a work lost, not a job lost. As traditional economic efficiency suggests, a job lost (by one) is a job gained (by another), and it is, in net terms, not a loss at all. But the lost work that ought to eventually translate into a job is a true loss, the loss that is only less, when compared to life saved, and only if we are able to save lives.

But to our dismay, a work lost is not merely a job loss, but a life lost. How minutely have we then strung survival with continuous economic activity, that discontinuity is threat to life? Here is then an amazing paradox to ponder; life that creates work is invaluable without it. But a macro perspective is less philosophical and consequently explains the phenomena of work lost better.

Contraction in economic activity (due to Covid-19, and otherwise) is something that has infected every aspect of economy, very akin to Covid-19 infections, that has impacted every aspect of human life. Combined then, the economic life, already under duress from internalized phenomenon of poverty, unemployment and hunger, has added externalizing impacts of health emergency.

Convex Internalized realities then concaves the crisis at hand, aggravating the losses, making it harder to explain to individuals who do not mirror the consciousness or the class of the vulnerable working population. It becomes then hard to explain to the middle class that a major population is being pushed to extreme poverty, and even harder to the upper class that how can one lose a job, or work.

What is harder to explain then is the ignorance that holds together the internalized realities or the awareness that upward mobility thrusts on the conscience of middle class. As expressed earlier, things overtime are hard to explain.

But then, it would be very ungrateful to not cherish a life that has been spared in a medical emergency, that to be in lack of words and explanation to express the ungratefulness.