It’s been like this for most of civilized history. Know anyone with the last name Miller? Five hundred years ago miller was a job description, not just a name. A miller was someone who ground wheat to make flour. Have any acquaintances named Smith? A smith was someone shaped metal for a living, making horseshoes, repairing iron pots, and so on–a blacksmith. So a toolmaker named Tom might be known as Tom Smith. His son would probably become a smith, duly inheriting job, name, and social standing.

If you were named Tom Smith and you were the village smith, you had better be pretty good at what you did. There weren’t a lot of other jobs around. You would be gossiped about if your work was subpar. That’s why you couldn’t just decide one day to be a blacksmith, hang out your blacksmith shingle the next day, and hope for the best. You worked as an underpaid, overworked apprentice for years, with little concept of job security or comfort. After years of what was literally (in the case of working in the smithy) a trial by fire you would eventually be considered by your employer and the rest of the village good enough to strike out–feeble pun intended–on your own.

At this point you’re probably fighting the urge to nod off. Hang on, I’m getting there. The link in my mind between your no-doubt reasonably high tech job and the plight of the village smithy is profoundly obvious. The days of the high paying, union-protected, cushy job with lax attendance requirements, a lifetime pension after 20 years and Congressional-style medical benefits are over. You’re in the same position as Tom Smith was back in 1608. He had to work every day as if his survival depended on it, because he wasn’t a member of a union with lavish benefit packages and locally powerful union bosses.

Companies are running much leaner these days. And they should be! Do the math! Suppose you’re 25 and make $40,000 a year. When I was a kid in the 70s lots of 25 year olds made that kind of money on the auto assembly lines. After 30 years on the job they could retire with a pension of at least $40,000/year and medical benefits beyond that, because with seniority and overtime they’d be making more like $120,000/year when they retired.

But what’s the life expectancy of someone who turned 55 in, say, 1995? At least another 20 years. Multiply that by $40,000/year plus another $10,000/year in medical benefits, and you’re talking a cool million for what is by definition someone adding no value to said factory. A million bucks. Back then companies like Ford and GM each employed hundreds of thousands of people. Think of the financial hit they took when thousands of people a year were retiring. Who paid all those benefits?

You did, if you bought a car. By now GM has to bake thousands of dollars into the price of each car they sell to pay for the benefits of the legions of retired workers. Buy a $22,000 Chevy Malibu next week, and think about how if it were a Toyota a car of the same quality would cost maybe $20,000 even after the punitive taxes we apply because it’s an import.

If you still don’t care about this issue, personalize it. Imagine you scrimped and saved and took on extra part-time jobs for 20 years to finance that neighborhood coffee shop you’ve fantasized about for so long. Now imagine how you’d feel if you hired a manager after three years of 110-hour weeks, and that manager demanded a benefits package that included a million dollars in benefits after retirement.

We are on a rapid course back to the future, where we once again must fend for ourselves. It is the only sustainable path to economic recovery. You have a direct responsibility to your family now. You have to become the best person for the job. If you aren’t, someone else will be.

We’ve accumulated enough savings to survive for a year if I lose my day job since that little fiasco. I could in theory slow down. I’m not going to.

Because one of the lessons I learned was this: always have a backup plan. Since I was 21 and got my first real job, I’ve always been studying at night for the next one. Despite having made substantially more than average for most of the last 25 years, I have always studied for my next gig.

(I admit there was a three-year pause. I was a program manager at Microsoft for Visual Basic, a computer language. It was my dream job. At night I was writing articles for magazines and studying Visual C++, another Microsoft programming language. Starting a job at Microsoft is a stiff challenge. It is time-consuming. It is stressful. My wife put up with this for a while, then one night gently asked why I was studying Visual C++. “So I can be ready for the next job” “But why did you study before?” “So I could get a job at a place like Microsoft… Oh, wait a minute….” Long pause.

I stopped my preparation for a few years. However, when I quit Microsoft and bought eSnipe I went right back to the same schedule. Because what if something happened to eSnipe? This had some painful and unintended consequences I will address in a later post.)

I’m working on the next business while you’re watching Lost and updating your Facebook page. I don’t know what Farmville is, but the new product is in fact making sales while I sleep.

What’s your backup plan?