Have you lost your soul? Were you just your job? Are you fit for nothing now, a drag on society, a problem that can't be solved?
Megan McArdle thinks so, and her barren, soulless assumptions lead straight to war, to the gulag, and to the ovens where the unproductive assets of humanity can be "soaked up." In the language of the dismal economist, liquidated:
"Human capital is like almost any other form of capital: it is a depreciating asset. The longer you stay out of the workforce, the less valuable you are to potential employers. You lose market intelligence and industry connections. Your technical knowledge and skills atrophy.
"I was unemployed for basically two years between . . . 2001 . . . and . . . 2003. ... I felt the isolation and the desperate fear of everyone who doesn't have a 'real job', the people who don't know how they're going to earn enough over the next forty years to keep body and soul together. I experienced real despair for the first time in my life. And it changed me, permanently.
"... What really matters is how it changed my outlook on the world. I became afraid then in a way that has never really left me. I obsess about economic security. I catastrophize small setbacks. ...
"There was also the crushing sense of isolation, and failure. ...
"[M]illions of people, staring into the abyss of an empty future. We don't know how to re-employ them. The last time this happened, in the Great Depression, World War II eventually came along and soaked up everyone in the labor force who could breathe and carry a toolbag. I hope to God we're not going to do that again, so what are we going to do with all these people?
-- Megan McArdle, here
Such is the way of death. Many are they who walk in it. But there is a way where there is no fear, where everyone is valued, not for what they do, but for who they are, for whom the future is full because God inhabits it:
Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?
Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?
Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?
And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:
And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, [shall he] not much more [clothe] you, O ye of little faith?
Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?
(For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.
But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.
Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day [is] the evil thereof.
-- Matthew 6:25-34
For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
-- Mark 8:35-36
Come unto me, all [ye] that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
-- Matthew 11:28
