I recently had a talk with my 82 year old father who shakes his head over all the changes he sees in American life. My father grew up in a time where you took a job, worked hard at it, and expected to work for that company until you died or retired.

Now he sees everyone going after what he calls “A nickel more.” That phrase refers to a time one summer when my oldest brother worked as a bag boy in a grocery store and kept changing stores for just a little more per hour. As he put it “Boy, you’re ready to jump if someone offers you just a nickel more.” That encounter was suspose to be a life lesson for us as children on company loyalty and sticking with something. However, he is more than shocked when I tell him that the average person today can expect to work for over 10 different companies during their working life.

My father does not understand globalization, mass marketing, or the concept of free markets. All he knows is that things have changed and it is not for the better. Having that conversation got me to wondering what did happen to start us down this road that is so well traveled and yet has made us so uneasy.

I sort of trace it back to the point where we decided to monetize everything, meaning everything can to be narrowed down to a dollar value based on our perceptions of that item. It is the reason you hear everyone talking about branding (such as the lowering of the brand of Brittany Spears). It is a mental calculation we all take for granted now and is the reason a rapper makes more than a teacher or a sports figure more than the President. And, that thinking is not lost on the younger generation. Have you been to a hospital lately? Almost 70% of the doctors you run into are foreign born. Foreign born because Americans no longer want to put in the time to go through 12 years of college to graduate to long hours and what now looks like a rather small salary when compared to the rapper or the sports figure.

Men seem to have picked up on this thinking more than women because so few men now attend college as to be considered a minority on some college campuses. During the Olympics in China they interviewed a Chinese economist who stated that America is now the victim of its own success. In other words: Why put in all that time and effort when you can short circuit the process and develop the next MySpace, write a catchy rap, or maybe even carry or hit a ball and live large beyond your wildest dreams.

The young are not the only ones affected by this kind of thinking. Remember when the best thing that Corporate America could say about a worker was that he/she was a “valued” employee. Now, those of us who don’t know programming, are not good phrase writers, and have no athletic ability are considered “work units” and our value is measured against the machine and productivity. We are interchangeable cogs in a 24/7 wheel that just keeps rolling from time zone to time zone, country to country.

Don’t get me wrong, I love computers and think a lot of this 21st century thinking has opened up a whole new frontier for the average person, otherwise I probably would not be writing this note to you right now. But, I can also understand my father’s confusion that no one uses the term “valued employee” any more and somewhere down the line we morphed into widgets.