I'm so f-ed. Laid off in June at 61

[DFW]

24. My younger daughter is an attorney as well

She graduated law school in New York in 2010 at age 25, right at the end of the Cheney-Bush recession. She wanted to work in Boston, New York or Washington DC. She graduated magna, but from a “second tier” law school. She couldn’t even get an interview.

So, she burned through some savings and flew to a legal job fair in Frankfurt. The Frankfurt branch of a British law firm showed some interest, but said they needed someone who was bilingual in English and German, had an EU work permit but an American bar exam. My daughter said, “here I am, that’s me on all counts.” So, she ditched her desire to work in the northeastern USA and moved to Frankfurt. The ironic ending is that two years after moving to Germany to work for the British firm, she was head-hunted by a New York firm for their Frankfurt office, did well, and became their youngest partner ever at age 31, and now makes many multiples of what I do.

It’s not enough any more just to be good at what you do. You have to be impossibly flexible, incredibly good at what you, amazingly convincing about how good you are, and lucky along the way. From the sound of it, it’s a brutal, unforgiving competition in the States these days, and in many fields. I went the opposite way decades ago, and built myself a fifty foot tall titanium wall of job security. That was nearly 50 years ago. The downside is that I’m now 72, stuck and can’t find a replacement. You’d think there would be someone out there with my job skills, work and residence permits for both the USA and the EU, and written/spoken English, German, French, Russian, Spanish, Dutch, Italian and at least one Scandinavian language. But apparently not☹️