The End of Work

Let’s face it…work is a mess…for many people, it’s gone and not coming back.  And for those left?  I wonder how many people actually like what they do as opposed to just getting a paycheck.

Our politicians think they can fix the work mess.  Both left and right flail away about work in ways that more match their particular pair of rose-colored glasses (thank you, Immanuel Kant!)  but what if what we are going through with work is….a divorce?

Work doesn’t want us anymore; but we cling to it, hope it will still love us, lie to ourselves about how much we still love it, and Work is the party that sees through the self deceiving BS.  Neither party is sure where they are going next; they just don’t want to be together, deep down, any more.  We say it’s necessary to stay together, but if you’ve ever been that situation, all you can think about is getting out, getting away from that which is causing you a lot of pain, necessity or no.

People getting divorced can’t see an upside when they’re going through it, all they are feeling is pain.  But once apart, you can begin to heal yourself and come back around to “being productive”, which, in this case, we have no idea what that means.

I saw this over at Ace of Spades and thought I have to post it here as well!  Thus, the revival…

A report from researchers at Oxford has suggested that almost half of American jobs will be replaced by technology.  While this sounds mighty grim, the upside take from the article is that this will emphasize the development of more creative and social skills.    This would certainly be an interesting society!  Full of writers and musicians?  Maybe….but perhaps people will be more creative about things they are not about now.  More refined solutions to ever more complex human problems!

This also hits an EOW theme….how can we really place psychological value in work when so many forces are trying to take it away from us?

One post in like 6 months is a sure sign this blog is moribund.  Upon reflection, I’m not sure that a blog was the right way to approach this topic, which is still in my head a lot.  I don’t mean to beat myself up over doing this as a blog; it just didn’t really give me what I’ve needed to have, and I suspect I haven’t really given the readers what they wanted to see.

I’m open to what people want to say about this in the comments and perhaps I can find a way to get back to this as a blog again….otherwise, not so much.

So I was watching Washington Journal on C-SPAN this morning and they were talking about the soon-to-be released 1940 census.

Much of the discussion was centered around charts and data…and comparison to the 2010 data.

Based on the 2010 data the percentage of Americans working in BOTH agriculture AND manufacturing is…12%!

Think about that — only 1 person in 8 in America grows food or makes things….wow.

Here is an article that distills a lot of what we’ve been talking about here at EOW into two simple categories:

Physical work, which is the first work to get extensively automated and

Mental work, which is now, relatively recently, getting the same systematic treatment that older physical work has.

Here’s a paragraph that hooked me:

To be frank, I’m not that sorry for them. Over the years, I have come to realize just how many skilled white-collar professionals are just phoning it in when they go to work every day. They fill out paperwork and connect the easy dots in pre-established formulas, rather than doing original, creative, conceptual thinking. Chances are you’ve seen one of those “mystery diagnosis” shows on cable TV, the ones that tell you the story of some guy who suffers a mysterious, debilitating ailment for years before he finally finds a specialist who tells him he has some rare disease. It seems like every one of those shows begins with a doctor who listens to the patient’s symptoms, plugs them into a common, familiar, and completely wrong diagnosis, and then lets it go at that. It begins with a doctor who’s going through the motions rather than doing original thinking to solve the problem.

There has been a lot of discussion recently about the falling value (and rising price) of a university diploma, and this is part of the reason for it. Much of a contemporary university education is designed to train dot-connectors, to fill students’ heads with established formulas and the received wisdom, but not to teach the kind of creative problem-solving that can only be learned, in my experience, by going beyond the canned knowledge peddled in the classroom and dealing with actual, real-world challenges.

[my emphasis]

 

It also strikes me how many “knowledge professionals” want to race to stuff some problem they’ve encountered into a known (to them) model or paradigm because it relates so strongly to how they make profit in their work.  The irony to me is how they racing to become…machine like.  Is it any wonder than we want the REAL machines to do more and more of these tasks?

For purposes of this blog, history really begins at the point where we go from being an agricultural economy/culture to….whatever comes next, usually industrialization.  And when we go from that second phase of economy to what we are now….that change happens faster and harder than the first.  And what we’re going through now?  I see the flames coming outta the engine of the Batmobile my friends!   This set of cycles, these ‘interlocking rings’ of tech, economy and culture are going on everywhere not just the US or Europe.  To be sure, how other places do this doesn’t have to replicate our experience, but may be informed by it.  Iceland went from an almost Medieval culture at the start of the 20th century to building modern cities, poof, from whole cloth thanks to the economic miracle known as the codfish! (See, Cod by Mark Kurlansky, one of my favorite books of the last few years!)

But it is quite sobering how much evil and suffering have occurred throughout the world in the same relatively short time.  When I read accounts of the First Battle of the Marne in WWI, I wind up feeling like we just handed monkeys machine guns and artillery and let them kill 100,000 people and wound another 400,000….in a week.  Even more sobering….that’s merely the tip of the iceberg of horrors in the last 150 years.  You know the names of the more famous horrors; do I have to spell them out?

Plus, there’s nothing to say that things won’t even get worse.  That’s the danger in times like this; the ‘solutions’ we think make sense may indeed damage things, well, I won’t say ‘beyond repair’, but such that fixing them will be exceptionally difficult.  Once we get behind bad ideas they entrench just as deeply as good ones.

But if there’s one thing I have confidence in, especially in America, is that we will work out things and the flaws of the old regime will be things we make fun of in the future.  I think it’s because we really don’t value the past all that much.  I know a lot of people that view this as a flaw, but I generally don’t!  There comes a point when we’ve peaked out with the old ways even though it’s hard to see.  I’ve long believed that everything becomes its own parody.

And, sort of amazingly, even older things get better than they were.  We’re far better at growing food than we were 150 years ago, and we’re better, more effective manufacturers than we were 70 years ago.  So, while we ride the wave of change, remember that we will find a way to build on what we’ve done.  The “information economy” we’ve been building for the last 30-40 years I view as kind of developing a ‘central nervous system’  for us as a culture.   But what brain will form from this?