"Career" has been sold as "that thing that gives you purpose." The abstraction of work, however, has also abstracted that purpose.

The synonyms of "career" include "vocation" "calling" and "walk of life." "Work" has synonyms including "toil" "drudgery" and "grind." The rebranding is only as good as the experience. As companies get larger, the bonds between the employer and employee become more tenuous and each individual part matters less and less. And unfortunately, as companies get larger, they get more efficient, have more buying power and tend to outcompete smaller firms.

We've got seven employees now. There's one of them whose absence wouldn't blow a giant hole in our organization, and that's because she's a part-time mom doing fill-around-the-edges work who has only been with us a couple months. The rest of them? Wax ebullient about their jobs on a daily basis, are strongly driven in pursuit of their "calling", and incorporate their profession deeply into their self-images. When there is a clean, clear connection between "thing you want to do" and "thing you get paid for" it's a lot easier to show up and get paid.

That all goes out the window when you're one of eighteen IT support personnel at T-Mobile Bothell, or when you're Associate 24 at Boost Mobile Store 533. What's your purpose? To earn a paycheck. What do you put up with for that paycheck? More than you want. What does that paycheck do for you? Less and less. This is something "the industry" was terrified of before the pandemic: young men, en masse, had discovered that the costs-benefits analysis of "Associate 24" vs. "I spend my days in my parents' basement teabagging n00bs in CS:GO" lean strongly towards getting gud at Counterstrike.

Related note: Remote Work May Now Last for Two Years, Worrying Some Bosses

'cuz here's the thing: if you rely on smoke and mirrors to keep your galley slaves at the oars, the universe turned on the lights back in March 2020. It was more fulfilling helping to design airports than helping to design Hooters. It was more fulfilling mixing shitty indie films than mixing shitty reality television. It is now more fulfilling to spend 80 hours a week melting bronze etc than it is mixing shitty reality television, despite the fact that shitty reality television paid me dumbly handsomely. Once you subtract the economics from the problem, it's just not something I want to put up with. Sitting at a million dollar console and controlling what seven million people hear? Yeah, that's pretty cool. But there's way too much bullshit that goes with it.

The bullshit has been increasing and the economic incentives have been decreasing. Full stop.

Western culture has been built on this premise that if you work hard, you'll get ahead. That contract was broken by Nixon, shoddy repairs have been attempted by every Democrat, and every Republican since has torn it down further. You have to understand, though, that the Republicans don't care. Their model is feudalism; they want rich people to inherit wealth and title and serfs to live nasty, brutish and short.

Their problem is the serfs are figuring out they'll never have wealth and title, though, so why break your back scything wheat for the lord of the manor? There's a copse at the end of the field where you can lay in the shade and watch the clouds go by and if the yeoman catches you he'll only whip you a few times.

I was going to be an architect. Throughout high school I worked for two different architectural firms and this project I worked on won a low-cost housing award, and this other one I worked on and have been to countless events inside of it, over the years.

I got out of school about 2:PM, went to work at Michael Moyer Architects or for Angela Danadjieva who is ... rather ... well ... known.

I loved that work. But I loved all work when I was 18. I washed the dirty coffee cups in the sink. I built scale models of huge construction projects. I drew presentation drawings - in ink! - on vellum and used a Kroy lettering machine to single-punch out every single letter used on the drawings. I made $8/hr, I think? And was happy to work as many hours as they wanted me around...

A week before I graduated from high school I got a job with a tech company making good money doing technical support for a hard disk manufacturer named Jasmine Technologies in 1987. I seem to remember it was $16k/yr. But who knows...?

The next time I looked up, it was 1998, I had worked for 6 different tech companies, was in the process of getting divorced, didn't socialize with anyone outside of work. When you moved to a new company you got all new friends, because there just wasn't time (or places) to meet up with people you didn't spend all day every day with. I was making $80k/yr.

Moved overseas in 1998. Back to the USA in 2005, or something.

After moving back to the US, the Boy Genius who had worked for Apple and NASA and had gotten $5m in funding from Esther Dyson AFTER the dot com crash, couldn't get a job. I had been off the treadmill so long (7 years) I might as well have been a high school student again. (LinkedIn had just started, and was inaccessible overseas. So I was starting from scratch on my job history.)

So went to college. Well, trade school. Got a job from the internship. Went on over the next 10 years to get fired from three jobs. Got hired for more. Started my own consultancy. Was a tour guide in Pike Place Market.

There's never been a time I was not sure I was totally indispensable to the company... right up to the moment I got fired.

The urgency of work and perception of need impressed upon the worker-bees in any organization gives the worker-bees a false sense of importance and value.

With the ultra rare exceptions of truly unique souls (who mostly perish from the work they do) you don't matter a bit to your employer. You die at your desk today, and they'll have the job posted tomorrow, and filled by Thursday. "Bummer about Bob. Everyone welcome Wayne to the Corporation Co. family!"

When I started work in the late 1980's, two of the previous generations worked with me at every job. And they'd been there for a decade or more.

My current company is VERY proud of the fact they have kept their employee turnover rate to just under 25%, which is unheard-of low in the Seattle tech industry. This is something they boast about... that only a quarter of our employees leave every year! We are a company of 400 people. I've been here for 5 years. The number of people who have been at the company longer than I have I can count on two hands and one foot.

AND, HR professionals in this market say that if you spend more than 2 years with a company, you are literally losing money. Because a new company can hire you for more money than your existing company can match with raises.

And I'm looking to retire in 10-15 years.

But I may have to involuntarily retire earlier than that, because I can't imagine anyone hiring someone of my broad and ill-defined skill set, at my age, for ANY reason.

And the work I do today puts me in a liability hot spot where if something bad happens with one of the contracts I have worked on, literally the easiest thing for the company to do to appease an angry customer worth millions of dollars is to fire my $90k/yr ass, and hire two bright-eyed college students to replace me for a $15k savings overall.

Work is already part-time. If you get a new job and take 4 months to ramp up, then at 16 months start looking for a new job, there's a small 9-10 month window of actual work and productivity in there sandwiched between job searches.

A local bar just advertised for a door man for $21/hr, and I thought, "Fuck. I'd LOVE to do that! And I could do my day job as well!"

Call it OnlyFans or Uber or DoorDash or bouncer or Amazon driver or Etsy or eBay or Mechanical Turk... the "gig economy" started in the 1990's and is only going to get bigger.

And it's the workers who stand to lose the most. As usual.