"I Had a Great Future Behind Me"

This winter, as headlines around the country trumpeted the comeback of the economy, 47-year-old Jost Lunstroth entered his eighth month without a job. Like thousands of other formerly successful Texans, he's found himself mired and humiliated in the harrowing new world of unemployment— with no end in sight.

by Mimi Swartz

February 2004

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SOMETIME LAST SUMMER I BEGAN to notice that my friend Jost Lunstroth had developed a verbal tic. He would suggest a time to meet for lunch and then punctuate the invitation with "Does that make sense?" Or he'd suggest an alternate route for walking our dogs around the neighborhood and ask the same question: "Does that make sense?" He would try to simplify the technical aspects of some job he had held in the past, and there it would be, springing from his lips afresh: "Does that make sense?" The question, I finally realized, was an outer manifestation of Jost's inner turmoil. A technology consultant, he'd lost his job in May and could not find another one.

Jost was always one of my more genial neighbors—an irrepressible tinkerer married to a patient, loving wife, a devoted dad who helped build a raft of plastic pop bottles to float down the bayou for his daughter's Indian Princess tribe, a good-natured colleague who used a rueful laugh to get through the absurdities of the workday. But then, for Jost, there were no more workdays. His weekdays and weekends had blurred into one long, uninterrupted, seemingly infinite chasm of free time. I'd catch him puttering around his house in cargo shorts and a T-shirt in the afternoons, raking his sable-hued hair away from his quizzical face, steadying his wire-rimmed glasses on his noble nose, occupying himself by painting trim that didn't really need painting or waxing floors that were already gleaming. At first I thought of Jost as being between jobs—so did he—and in fact, after losing one job last spring, he'd gotten another right away. But then that position evaporated too, and a few weeks of unemployment began to stretch, languidly and insidiously, into months. Eight of them so far.

It wasn't long before Jost stopped appreciating the "gift" of free afternoons with his seven-year-old son and evenings devoted to homework with his twelve-year-old daughter. He wanted to get back to work but instead found himself trapped in a grown-up version of musical chairs, in which there was, suddenly, no spot for him. Once, he'd been overwhelmed with work, serving as the point man for myriad companies—half marketing executive, half tech guru—helping them to integrate their old identities with their new Internet presence. Jost was connected 24-7, armed with the requisite cell phone, BlackBerry, laptop, and frequent-flier plan. Now, he sent out résumés and no one responded. He hustled for interviews and no one called. He imagined all sorts of slights and snubs from his working friends. All day, every day, he navigated the waves of his own panic: His unemployment checks would cease in February; his daughter's private-school tuition would remain at $10,000 a year; he and his wife, Rebecca, were borrowing from savings they'd put aside for the kids' college and their retirement. How was he supposed to do that math?

Jost's state of affairs struck him as not just nonsensical but incomprehensible. He was a white male, 47, who had voted, in equal measure, for Republicans and Democrats. Until last year, he and his wife brought in a combined income in the low six figures, which allowed them to settle, with their children, into a nice home in a nice Houston neighborhood. His family enjoyed New Mexico ski vacations and Caribbean cruises. Dinner out at will. Fun money for the kids. And then, through some seemingly inexplicable changes in the economic climate, the Lunstroths' tide of prosperity began to recede, until Jost began to fear it would evaporate entirely. "I'm trying not to become a cynic," he told me one day last fall, in a sharp, flat tone I'd never heard him use before.

Jost was not alone. In the past year, I'd seen other dads—up the block, around the state, across the country—in the same situation. Most of them were in their forties, white, and educated; they were used to making good salaries and contributing their share to society. They were men who should have been at the peak of their power and ability who were, instead, chronically out of work, ever-present at after-school pickup and PTA meetings. With the dubious luxury of ample free time, they were forced to rethink their life plans and to wonder whether the order they had worked so hard to establish was always as illusory as it seemed today.

The most optimistic economic reports claim that these men will be back at work by spring. ("The phrase 'jobless recovery' may no longer apply," heralded the Houston Chronicle in November.) But the strength of this recovery remains uncertain. Employers are still reluctant to bring on new employees; any working person knows that companies are doing more with fewer people to keep profits healthy. The recent job growth trumpeted by the administration is mainly in lower-paying service jobs (restaurants, retail) and in temporary work. Many manufacturing and low-end tech positions have been shipped overseas. A large number of people whose unemployment benefits have run out are now reported in government statistics as working, not as people who have given up looking. In Texas, uncertainty over the energy business continues to limit innovation and expansion.

What has changed for certain in the past few years—the years of this latest economic downturn, from 2000 until now—is the world of unemployment. Like everything else in this country, it's been altered by the values and (former) affluence of the people who've joined it; it's more mechanized, more modernized, more exploitative, and more socially stratified than before. It is an alternate universe full of predatory recruiters and capricious employers, with religion and technology taking on brave new roles. The only means of escape—finding a job—requires formidable persistence, herculean stoicism, and a nearly boundless supply of cockeyed optimism. Just ask Jost.

LAST AUGUST JOST STARTED KEEPING a blog to give some order to his life. He called it "I Had a Great Future Behind Me." "Sent out boatloads of résumés and made tons of calls," he wrote in his online journal. "No callbacks and no interviews. It is a very strange feeling to be a few years from fifty and to not be employable."

By then he had been out of work for three months. In that time Jost tried to launch an interactive map company for downtown businesses and continued to volunteer for Bill White's mayoral campaign, realizing that his lifelong enthusiasm for politics might now turn up a job lead. Still, he found nothing. He supplemented his white-collar search with a blue-collar search by applying for a shift leader's job at a Coca-Cola plant. "I figured what the hell," he wrote. "I filled out the application along with a bunch of unemployed folks. Most looked like manual-labor types, but there was another guy like me—white, well-dressed, professional-looking. The most depressing thing in the world was when the lady behind the bulletproof partition took my application, did not even look at it, and said, 'They will call you if they are interested.'" They weren't. Jost applied for work as a waiter at a catering company—no thanks. He offered to work as a substitute teacher for the Houston Independent School District and was told they weren't accepting any more applications. "Thanks for everything, George and Dick," Jost wrote in his blog.

If you are like most people, your first instinct would be to distance yourself from someone in Jost's situation, to assume that he had done something that rendered him unemployable or that he could find a job if he really wanted to—anything to reassure yourself that you could never end up in his predicament. Jost's work history, however, shows nothing of the kind. Until the past year or so, he worked steadily all his life. "I have done everything right," he typed in his blog. "College, obey the laws, work hard, honest, good father and husband, good neighbor and friend, just no job and no prospects."

Jost grew up in a struggling neighborhood near downtown Houston, where the air is scented with the aroma of coffee from a nearby plant. He was the son of an inventor and an actress; there were four kids and little money. Jost worked: cutting grass, throwing newspapers, stacking cans in a local grocery store, selling seeds door-to-door. He wanted to go to college to become a civil rights lawyer but instead found himself, at the height of the oil boom, an assistant manager at Tony's restaurant. He stayed six years, becoming a trusted lieutenant to one of the most demanding employers in town. In 1987 he married Rebecca Black, a clear-eyed, strong-willed beauty from Pittsburgh, a lawyer who soon joined Shell Oil Company's human resources department.

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