“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest…. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist.”
–Buckminster Fuller, 1970
The most satisfying and fulfilling job I ever had was that of small town radio announcer. About a dozen years from the early 70s to the early 80s. We still played vinyl 45s and LPs on turntables. We recorded on magnetic tape. Nobody much cared (within limits) what we said. Looking back, I can see that I was fortunate to catch the tail end of radio’s best years. From Work+Money:
One in 10 of the nation’s 33,202 radio and television announcers are expected to see their jobs disappear by 2026. Consolidation in the industry, as well as increased use of syndicated content, is fueling the decline. There’s also the explosion of streaming music services. More and more listeners prefer that over their local, drive-time disc jockey.
Party DJs however, are seeing an uptick in business with demand for their services projected to grow about six percent by 2026. And they earn about the same – $32,000 – as their on-air counterparts.
I thought radio was a dying profession twenty years ago. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has some interesting data on the profession but, like the article above, they combine radio and TV announcers. I’d like to know how many of each.
This article is way too long for anyone with a job to read. So here are a few nuggets:
“Work is … how we give our lives meaning when religion, party politics and community fall away.”
Whether you look at a screen all day, or sell other underpaid people goods they can’t afford, more and more work feels pointless or even socially damaging – what the American anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit jobs”
“I do think there is a fear of freedom – a fear among the powerful that people might find something better to do than create profits for capitalism.”
As all such articles do, this one mentioned UBI (Universal Basic Income). I don’t know if that’s a good idea or not. But I can almost imagine a world in which — for whatever reasons — there are just a whole bunch of people without jobs. And I can only see two options for dealing with them: Let them starve or provide them with food and shelter. Some way, somehow. I’m counting on smarter people to come up with more options.
What it will mean to be an elderly millennial (Vice)
“Sometime before death, but after your useful phase, there’s supposed to be this in-between time called “retirement” that sounds pretty great—sorta like childhood, but without anyone trying to teach you anything, and with more drinking.”
And if your plan is to keep working…
“There’s no evidence that jobs for millennials in their 70s will exist. “In terms of their ability to work or keep up with their logical progress—the job requirements are changing a lot faster than human beings can be trained.”
There are now more Americans working for online publishers and broadcasters than for newspapers, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employment at online outlets first eclipsed newspapers in October 2015. […] Radio broadcasting jobs fell from January 1990 to March by about 27 percent.
This post by David Cain looks at what it means to be your own boss. I’ve never been my own boss for many of the reasons mentioned by Mr. Cain. Looking back, I think that need to escape was there much of the time.
I wish somebody had pulled me aside and told me that the education system and working culture I’m going to be marched into are places that are ultimately going to need escaping from.
Parents (I’ve never been one) might bristle at Mr. Cain’s take on children but it seems a valid observation;
Many people deal with the vapidity of their jobs by having children, because parenting lends an immediate seriousness and purpose to one’s role on the planet. Providing for a child is an act that feels intrinsically meaningful to a human being, and so devotion to your job, even a dull one, can become an extension of devotion to your role as a parent, giving meaning to the hoops to be jumped through at work.
If you’ve ever thought of escaping the 9-to-5 life, the full post (below) is worth a read.
David Graeber is a Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. There’s so many interesting ideas in this essay. Here are a few of my favorites.
“What would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear?”
I stopped for a few seconds to think of the jobs I had (DJ, postal inspector, middle manager, web monkey) and confess nothing very bad would have happened if they disappeared.
“Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. … It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.”
“The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.”
“Technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. … Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter.”
“There’s a couple of arguments against the idea that AI is coming soon. One is, as you say, a philosophical argument, which boils down to “However smart machines seem to get, they’ll never have true human intelligence.” I just don’t think that matters. You can call it intelligence or something difference, but that’s semantic. What matters is that they can accomplish the same things humans can.”
“So who has all the money? It’s whoever has the robots. And who has the robots? The people who have all the money. Today’s income inequality will be peanuts compared to income inequality then. […] If I’m right about what happens with artificial intelligence, there won’t be any work, period, so there won’t be dignity in work. We’ll have to find dignity in doing other things.”
This post below by David Cain is probably the best thing I’ve ever read about retirement. More accurately, it’s about people who are retiring much earlier than “normal” (45, or 40 or even 30) It’s long (for a blog post) but worth a read. A few excerpts:
“Those of us with jobs have arranged to sell off large parts of our lives (8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for decades) to employers, in exchange for money that we can use to build a life that makes us happy.”
“When you compare the amount of happiness we actually derive from our unnecessary spending habits to the amount of happiness that can be derived from years of paid-for freedom (not to mention a clear and secure financial position the whole way there), most of those consumer habits come to appear glaringly absurd.”
“Would you rather have five all-expenses-paid years off to spend with your family, learn a language or build a business — or drive a big car instead of a small car?”
“Common Western fallacy: that for you to be as happy as you currently are, you need to spend as much as you currently do.”
In a couple of days I will have been unemployeed for three months. While I haven’t thought about my old job very much, I have thought some about work in the abstract. Work seems to be part of the fabric of our lives.
I’ve always taken it as a given that we are supposed to work. To be productive. Not just to put beans on the table but because work is part of the Grand Scheme of Things. People with meaningful work are happier, I’ve been led to believe.
I’ve got less than 100 days of not working under my belt but I’m starting to question how existentially critical work is. Perhaps it’s a concept that was started by someone that needed to keep those factory jobs filled.
For many years I bought into the notion that Work was essential in providing meaning to our lives. These days, I’m not so sure.