an idle thought I've had at the back of my head for a while is that a lot of white collar/middle class jobs used to be legitimately fun and/or intellectually stimulating and/or ludicrously well paid and now they're few or none of those things, and we don't talk about that at all
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I didn't think I thought for a moment my working life would be like theirs had been till then.
Most of this was unrecognisably changed within about 18 months.
Jobs were endured. Deadlines, bullying, sexual predators, redundancy, the glass ceiling for woman, minorities and oiks. The stories aren't fabricated.
The closed shop made many jobs like the media out of bounds unless you had the right tie or parents. And the Masons...
Successive growth obsessed govts all failing have sucked the life out of all of those jobs... no creativity, no risk, no fun.
My brother is a teacher now and just gets by.
Parallel to the enshittification of good jobs is housing scarcity.
Many reasons why.
There's always an AI generated summary. It is liberating. It's been ages since I've been this productive!
“When I was a lad” a council job was seen as hitting the jackpot as you had steady salary, pension & low personal health impact. It was the “job for life”
But you're right on the issues.
This is where Cameron's "Big Society" idea was quite interesting IMO but came to nothing because he never remotely engaged with those issues.
- Competition to get to the pinnacle of some jobs increasingly makes it not fun (eg aspiring to aw firm partner)
- “Greedy jobs” where people are expected to be on at all times. https://hbr.org/2021/09/the-problem-with-greedy-work
- Older people romanticise how great it was when they were young
I can’t think of a profession that has been more devalued than architecture. It used to be reasonably paid and designers would have some status and agency. It’s now a byword for poor pay and overwork, which is only for the independently wealthy.
I think the main drivers are the change in contracts/procurement, and the shift toward being a provider of services as opposed to being an arbiter of professional standards. I’d be interested to explore the gender implications.
I loved delivering carpets and underlay, but I was 22 - fit and young and no commitments
I quite liked working shifts for a roll on/roll off ferry company, but I was late 20s, earning a lot and spending a lot
I envy the enthusiasm of the young!
Hell, my old man told me "do ANYTHING but this if you can at all pick something"
https://slate.com/culture/2009/05/matthew-crawford-s-shop-class-as-soul-craft.html
Quite soul-crushing, tbh :(
My job is all very corporate, but I treat it as a pay cheque - much to my bosses amazement some times - so we can eat, give kiddo a good education etc.
You can’t just do a thing cos you like it your expected to make it profitable somehow or feel like you need to because your skint
For visual artists & writers, nothing now can compare.
The vast majority of work is not fulfilling, it's utilitarian.
I can't afford any of the these things but am still the most senior lawyer in the company
Not the main issue. Most of us would settle for pay staying the same just to be able to get some bodies in to make the days tolerable/fun again
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0029hlg?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile
Although I wonder how much of this is things happening in parallel. In this case the rise of both easy reporting culture (easier to get productivity data so employers become reliant on such metrics) + everything being online (laptops/smartphones etc)
Changes over time - like social media - have made this more common.
Quite likely this has driven more...
You'd never, for instance, say on LinkedIn 'I turned in this perfectly adequate bit of work today'.
Is that so unrealistic? Otherwise what’s the point?!
'Er. was ours a bluey silver or more platinum? I know it's not a bronzey one...'
Being in an office daily was painful, exhausting and unproductive.
An extrovert designed this.
1/2
Occasionally massively overwork but also step back when I just can't.
Is it perfect? No. Does it make it less inherently stressful just to do my job? Yes.
Do I still want to kill some colleagues? Also yes.
That a meeting with London ad agency would be 9am train, meeting, boozy lunch, pm train back by 5.30.
Unsurprisingly, Gen Z are not very keen on taking them and would rather be freelance or an entrepreneur.
(Having said that, I once got flown around Hawai'i for a week to cover their higher education sector, so maybe I should shut up)
On a more serious note, working on stories about exploitation in mining/tax avoidance, I reported from places like Zambia and Ghana. That stuff, which is actually worthwhile, is also harder to do.
Good job I'm not a journalist