My good friend Captain Dramatic just lost his job, bringing to five the number of my close friends who are currently unemployed. In his mail he talks about the great team he was a part of, and wonders why the potential couldn’t be better utilized. This feeling of wasted effort, wasted potential is all too familiar.

I once spent two years building an intranet for a little company of 250 people, developing content, designing the interface, finding new ways of automating internal processes using the Web. Then an American who’d never been to Montreal was hired to be director of the North American division, and decided the office should be in Silicon Valley. 210 of us Montrealers 250 were laid off, and the remainder were kept simply to tie up loose ends. All this expertise, gone. My intranet, two years of love and work, wiped into oblivion.

I realize those decisions (sometimes seemingly arbitrary) have to be made in order for a business to survive. However, they breed a workforce that eventually can take no interest in its work. It’s very hard to get enthusiastic about a new project, when you think that all it takes is the right neuron to fire in some pointy-haired suit’s head, for the whole thing, regardless of whether it makes sense or not, to disappear.

Freud said what we do in love and work (which lightspeeddad re-interprets as “sex and money”) has the greatest influence on our happiness. What would Freud say about society now?