I was talking to my peers, and every single one of them currently feels anxious, uncertain and insecure about the future. Some are impacted by a layoff, some are anticipating one, some settled for a pay cut, while others are figuring out ways to make money to fund their life or parenthood. My nephew himself is concerned about which career to pick, as white-collar jobs seem to be dead ends or easily replaceable. I mean, what sort of world have we created that education is being undervalued? Is this made up? Is my internet wrong? Is it just my threatened privilege feeling concerned about its general expectation of "life will get better" not adding up anymore?
I really don't know how to make my point without qualifying that, of course, education is a privilege in a third world country, having a white collar job at all, let alone from pre covid era is a privilege, not having job insecurity for even few years is a privilege. What I really want to say is that, even that privilege is seemingly eroding away.
suppose
Say you are indeed laid off today, not because you underperformed, but because a clanker has been trained by learning (read stealing) from millions of people like you who involuntarily built the knowledge base for it. What do you do now? Do keep in mind that you would now be competing for a job with many other senior and junior candidates, thus driving the value of your cognitive abilities further down.
jester-ification of education
Perhaps you become a content creator. You package a skill, an opinion, a hobby, or a private moment into something that can hold attention long enough to be monetised. It was even a genuine route taken by one of the impacted folks in this video.
To be clear, I don’t think content creation is lesser work, nor do I think social and cognitive skills are opposites. I’m unsettled by the possibility that more and more people may have to turn themselves into a product to survive. Attention becomes job security; personality becomes inventory.
The platforms reward urgency, spectacle, parasocial intimacy, and persuasion. Even people who begin by making useful, thoughtful work can be nudged towards constant performance and conversion. The fear is not that people make art, teach online, or build communities. It is that precarious work might push everyone into the same competition: perform, persuade, monetise, and keep performing or disappear. In fact, the entire loop is to use these advertising platforms to target demographics to sell more ads to. They collect data, you sell ads. Which demographies are more likely to buy from you? Vulnerable ones? Addictive ones? Hopeless ones? What things are more likely to be sold? Ones that make their lives genuinely better? Ones that make this world a less anxious place?
I call this jesterification of education: not because creators are jesters, but because a system that promised stability through learning may now ask people to entertain the market to remain economically visible.
I read a post from a dear member of Indie Web Club after writing this post, and I wholeheartedly agree with the facts they were sharing. And, I also feel grief over losing out on the promise of education. Can I just say, this sucks?
I don't know what the endgame here is if all desk jobs are to be replaced with an "agent". I am pretty sure the mission statement of these AI companies ultimately is to replicate the output of a group of humans who set out to solve a problem. But if white-collar workers are not paid, who pays those who depend on the income of white-collar workers? Who is all this in service to? Is it simply late-stage capitalism, baby?
systemic failure
Much of my angst is also coming from feeling abandoned due to the failure of democracy and corporations in providing law, order, stability and jobs. I mean, I live in a country that proclaims to be the mother of democracy, while actively curbing dissent. It is almost like it treats its own citizens as cockroaches.
You can't walk for more than 100 meters in any city of this country no, really, any city, without seeing garbage, inhaling the pollution, hearing excessive honking, playing the game of Subway Surfers IRL while walking on a nonexistent footpath, or feeling the free rollercoaster ride one gets by driving over potholes on frequently dug-up roads, all while sensing a lack of empathy for fellow citizens.
scarcity
On empathy, I see a deep sense of scarcity in many people around me, especially in urban India. Much of it could simply be fabricated, but I am pretty sure their feelings driving it are very real. Why shouldn't they? Many have experienced generational poverty or insecurity at some point, and even if their parents had what would seem like a relatively rich life by today's standards, a paid-off house in their 30s, a cute hatchback car, two or more kids, and a long career at the same company ahead of them, with a pension, which they reluctantly had to retire from; there was, and still is, scarcity behind it all. One may even argue that this very scarcity mindset prevented lifestyle inflation back then, it was a survival mechanism.
But today, that same mechanism can make us see every person as a target to outpace, a seat in public transport to be "stolen" from a fellow passenger, and an inch of gap in traffic as a campsite until the next inch opens up. Of course, we feel entitled to these things because our problems were much worse than others, and now the world has to pay back by adjusting to our needs. We are always in a rush, never pausing to reflect on whether we are trading today's peace for a hypothetical peace in the future. Can anyone convince me that tomorrow will surely be better than today? If not, then why should I rush my way to worse tomorrow?
On one hand, we have more food than ever, more clothes than ever, cheaper renewables, and more money (in the hands of very few) than ever. Yet it feels like there is immense scarcity amid an abundance that remains unreachable. With education failing to provide stable employment, are we really carrying this scarcity mindset into a much bleaker future? I shudder to imagine what that world would look like.
get out
I am not the only one to rant online about systemic failures. It isn't hard to find comments like "Leave this country ASAP" or "Don't return back you'll regret it" online. Maybe these woes are indeed solved elsewhere. It isn't hard to find citizens of country I reside in being surprised by how easily they are able to walk over 20K steps abroad, or how traffic could clear without a single honk. But then, it's not like the citizens of the countries my fellow citizens are fleeing to have a very positive outlook on life themselves, regardless of their political leanings. Housing crises or cost-of-living crises are just terms now; they don't even feel like "crises" that require "urgent" solutions. Yet, there are unemployment cheques, public schools are functional, there are more green spaces, and governments are trying to aid new parents.
It feels so tragic that I feel I literally have to uproot my life in pursuit of a more humane experience. In fact, for my community specifically, I feel generationally displaced, with no "village or hometown" of my own, each generation leaving one country at a time. I may someday write a bit more about that. I wonder what would my hypothetical self from a better country write today, would he have the same experience too? How much of this is wrong place and wrong time? How much of this is simply, wrong person?
wait, was Karl right?
When I read about Karl Marx's concept of alienation, it looks like I'm simply describing symptoms of alienation. Even if he saw it coming, what have we done about it? What are we doing about it?
I'll ask again, is my internet wrong? Can you convince me that this is all in my head and life is actually beautiful? What kool-aid langar did I miss out on? Do I have the wrong personality? Am I just feeling the loss of community and third spaces, because the point of life is not avoiding pain, but experiencing it with others? Whom am I asking this of? Are you listening? Do you feel this too?
this post is "sponsored" by
- my very slow and reflective reading of Anxiety by Samir Chopra
- two drafts that got merged into this rant
- this video about layoffs
- this video about how to have fun even if it is bad for you
- this podcast about neuroticism and my realisation of my own catastrophizing mood
- this podcast about age of uncertainty and structural infertility
- another podcast about millennial midlife crisis
- this news report about a neglected part of the capital of the country I live in
- this video about a driver trying to vlog simultaneously to make ends meet, and they seem successful on both accounts, so kudos to them!
- /r/layoffs.