People are born with three skills: (1) to breathe; (2) to feed; and (3) to learn. When they breathe they live today, when they eat they will live tomorrow, and while they learn they can survive a lifetime. For some fortunate people, what gets them up in the morning is the pleasure of learning something new. While perhaps not a conscious thought, it's the novelty, the variety, the different experience of work or study that makes daily life a pleasure. When the opportunity to explore and understand is provided in a structured setting it can be thrilling. But it's not so for everyone. The economic restructuring of the 1980s claimed many casualties. There were people who were never able to recover from losing their jobs. They had neither the right chance to learn a new skill or profession linked to the certainty of work, nor a helping hand to deal with their terror of new technology. The author contends that only by overcoming resistance to continual learning can people forestall the same fate for those hit by the current economic disintegration.