I am nearing 50 now, and it can seem like a precarious place.

Besides health concerns and a growing sensitivity to the effects of mortality, there are also the questions that surface about meaning and purpose, and personal productivity as you head into your later years. It’s the season in life where everything you’ve learned so far should be mixed and mingled enough to be of use daily in making a living. And for some, it can be a season when questions about finances and the future raise anxieties.

I’ve never been driven by money, and because of that, I’ve probably never been overly concerned to make sure I collected enough of it, or careful enough to acquire skills to be able to earn gobs of it. And that’s okay. My mentality helped me to try and live somewhat within meager means during my younger yearts, and my life has still been a quality one. I’ve never been left wanting or needing much. I haven’t had my own family that I’ve had to take care of, so no one was dependent on me for things. I’ve only had to try and take care of myself.

But we get older, and the money questions hang around anyways. It’s just a law of life: we always fret a bit about how we will handle the requirements of surviving in our tomorrows. And it’s seemingly another law of life, that as we get older, the costs of living in those tomorrows grows as well.

And every person, every family, has to figure out how to make ends meet and how to afford a life they hope to live.

I know at times my present job could easily disappear, and as a guy in midlife who’s a slow learner in the techie technical field I wandered into, I am a sort of a one trick pony there. I can write PHP code and manipulate MySQL databases. I can convert images to Cascading Style Sheets that make a page pretty and load fast. That’s kind of the gist of that skillset, though. And there are tons of kids out there who can do these things way better than I can.

I stop and write something on this site every day. I can put a decent sentence together when I have to. I am also pretty adequate at condensing and synthesizing information. I can do that better than many, I’d say. Drawing conclusions out of such analysis is a different beast, though, and I am not sure being able to do that is my real gift. But I am probably passable at that. But I can string words together in a readable way.

But the kind of writing I do is not really technical writing, which is a detailed, specifics sort-of writing required to guide someone on how to understand, use, or do something. And my writing is also not marketing writing, which is language constructed in a way to persuade others to think a different way, or to buy something, or to act. My writing is not marketing writing because I am not geared to write to try and sell anything to others. I am wired to try and write toward realism, and fact, and truth, and leave whatever is asserted open for the reader’s evaluation and acceptance. I’m not into pressuring or persuading. I write pretty much to put something out there, and if you like it, great- and if not, life goes on, for me and for you.

So I write, but it is hardly business writing. I could do some of that if I had to, but it is not my natural interest.

I’ve been to school a lot over the years, but my education has been very generalist. My undergraduate degree was a liberal arts degree. My seminary education focused on theology and philosophy. My graduate business degree covered the basics of managing a business and understanding economics. Most of my education has circled around the conceptual, and not the practical.

But you have to have skills to survive these days. Like in any other day. You have to provide an employer with value, and enough value to warrant receiving a commensurate wage. Or you have to provide goods or services of your own in the marketplace that are both desired and equitably priced. You have to provide people with something they want that they are also willing to pay appropriately for.

Which takes me back to being near 50 and feeling like a one trick pony.

I suppose my current skillset still has value in a particular market.I’m not sure what the rest of my skills might otherwise be worth, had they had to be called on.

But you find out what you can do when you need to do it.

And you do what you need to to be as valuable as you can wherever you are anyways.

I suppose anyone at any age can be employable and excellent at their work, or be unproductive and ineffective at their work. And the difference between the two is largely a product of personal assertion and education and participation.

I suppose a lot of it is making sure that you do your best wherever you are to provide value. Some value is a product of skills. Some value is a product of knowledge. And some value is a product of experience and living.