4

Sudden Unemployment Looms Around Every Corner

To see how the world of work is terrifying in ways that it didn't used to be, just look at the word "layoff." A layoff used to mean that you were actually "laid off," meaning you were idle while the shop was idle. When the shop got going again, they'd call you back up. When the word was coined, it meant a worker taking the pedal off the gas. Now it means crashing over the median and smacking into oncoming traffic.

So tens of millions of us live in fear of that sudden unscheduled meeting ("Can I see you in my office?") or just showing up to work one day and finding out your keycard doesn't unlock the door anymore. It's not like it's an unreasonable fear to have -- unemployment is a killer. And I mean that literally. You're twice as likely to experience a stroke, have a heart attack, and experience that ultimate life event (dying) when you're laid off. It's why recessions even make it more likely for people to die, full stop.

In America, unions have all but disappeared and that means that the vast majority of workers are functioning under the rules of "at will employment", which means you can be fired at any time, for any reason, without warning, with no recourse (unless you can somehow prove it was due to discrimination against one of the few specific protected classes). And even if you think you can prove that, the layoff thing can make it hard to consider paying a lawyer to help you take legal recourse.

3

"Learn To Code" Isn't An Answer

Joe Biden, famous anti-malarkey presidential candidate, recently got up on a stage and basically said "Learn to code!" to a bunch of coal miners facing the death of their industry. These people spent their whole lives mining coal, worrying about black lung, and fighting wars with mine bosses. But coal is going out of style (something about how it's slowly rendering the earth uninhabitable) so time to shift gears, right? It's just that simple!

If you're young, it's not just Joe telling you to learn to code. Everybody's telling you to code, or to major in business, or to suddenly learn all sorts of practical things. "Well, don't major in Literature, you big doofus! Do something useful like business!" It turns out, though, that students are doing just that, putting on their big-boy ties and majoring in business. It's the most popular major by a long shot. The second most popular? Health sciences. That wave of unemployable scarf-wearing writer kids we keep hearing so much about? Yeah, Business majors outnumber them by about ten to one.

2

Everyone Has To Be A Jack-Of-All Trades

There's a bit that the brilliant comedian Mitch Hedberg used to do where he talks about being a comedian in Hollywood. He said:

When you're in Hollywood and you're a comedian, everybody wants you to do other things. All right, you're a stand-up comedian, can you write us a script? That's not fair. That's like if I worked hard to become a cook, and I'm a really good cook, they'd say, "OK, you're a cook. Can you farm?"

1

The Only Long-Term Answer Is Relentless (And Exhausting) Curiosity

What used to be a particular personality type -- the person who is constantly learning, and constantly curious about others and how they live their lives -- is apparently now a requirement. You need that person's restlessness and addiction to novelty, their confidence to always be trying new things in spite of failure.

In the old world, confidence came from knowing your shit. Learn enough about the dingleberries and the gimbalhoppers of your line of work and you could speak on it with authority. But that authority is constantly shifting beneath our feet. Things we thought were solid are now amorphous, and at any moment your entire knowledge base can suddenly become useless. "Everything you spent thirty years learning how to do? This robot has it built-in from Day 1. Your severance is this commemorative coffee mug. The handle broke off."

It seems like from here on out, confidence comes from being able to ask the right questions and being able to interrogate why and how we do things. It comes from realizing that you don't know anything, or that what you know might become meaningless by this time tomorrow. For those of you who are already locked into the Industry of the Future, just understand that it's a rough goddamn world out there for the vast majority of us. So have a little mercy for everybody putting in a day's work. Especially those coal miners trying to become coders, proverbially or otherwise.