LJ Idol Week Five
"Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door."
Haven't we all heard that saying a bazillion times? Supposedly it goes all the way back to the 19th century, as a misquotation of Ralph Waldo Emerson; the mousetrap didn't even exist until after his death.
What's that saying even supposed to mean nowadays?
We're all supposed to be "makers" rather than "takers," to have upwardly mobile aspirations, to work tirelessly and cheerfully, to produce a steady stream of creative and innovative ideas, to compete relentlessly with all those other people in all those other countries.
The reality?
Young adults graduate from college and there is nothing for them to do. Yeah, in my day we too had that "can't get experience if you can't get a job" Catch-22. But today many of the jobs that provided a foot in the door to the middle-class world of work, such as clerk-typists and administrative assistants and receptionists, don't exist anymore, thanks to everything from email and spreadsheets to sophisticated phone-answering systems. Other jobs have become, guess what, unpaid internships -- requiring prospective interns to have families who can afford to support them.
And those families? Don't even get me started on how people who used to be considered just "seasoned" and "experienced" are now just unemployable Luddites. But we are told that society NEEDS to set the retirement age higher and higher! So what exactly are people supposed to DO between the ages of, say, 45 and 70? Sit on the street corner and jingle a cup and chant, "Spare change, spare change"?
Some of my friends' kids are now in college (and accumulating vast quantities of student loan debt in the meantime). One is almost done with her nursing program, and I'm thrilled for her, but will she be crowded out of the field by immigrants who study for just a few weeks, manage to pass the U.S. nursing boards and then work for lower wages? Another is a biochemistry major interested in pathology or forensic science as potential careers. I'm inclined to encourage her to choose the latter, because I would think that some law-enforcement jobs will still require U.S. citizenship in the decades to come, but with digital imaging, it would be easy for labs to send "slides" halfway around the world for diagnosis by pathologists in lower-cost countries, leaving only minimum-wage technicians here to collect the samples and then forward the "sorry, you have cancer" messages to the American patients (who have higher and higher deductibles to meet before they can afford the treatment, but that's another story).
So ... people are working longer hours, more tethered to their jobs than ever before (a significant percentage of workers don't take all their vacation days, and what would happen to them if they refused the boss's text message while on the beach?), paying endlessly higher bills without getting larger paychecks, terrified they'll lose their jobs ... and we're all supposed to be infinitely creative and compete in the global marketplace? Especially after signing all those non-compete and intellectual-property agreements when getting the job in the first place?
Don't get me wrong; I greatly admire the maker culture and have tried to figure out where I fit into it. Nine days ago I went to my community's first Mini Maker Faire and was thrilled to see the outpouring of ideas and projects. But sometimes it's darned hard to feel creative and inspired when the bills have piled up too high. And the output I've always claimed as my own -- words written on a page -- have been devalued so much by the implosion of journalism and other forces that I'm sometimes tempted to rip up my entire backstory and start all over again.
Build a better mousetrap? Hell, we are all blind mice in the corporatocracy's trap.
This entry was originally posted at http://luscious-purple.dreamwidth.org/151730.html. Please feel free to comment either here or there.
Haven't we all heard that saying a bazillion times? Supposedly it goes all the way back to the 19th century, as a misquotation of Ralph Waldo Emerson; the mousetrap didn't even exist until after his death.
What's that saying even supposed to mean nowadays?
We're all supposed to be "makers" rather than "takers," to have upwardly mobile aspirations, to work tirelessly and cheerfully, to produce a steady stream of creative and innovative ideas, to compete relentlessly with all those other people in all those other countries.
The reality?
Young adults graduate from college and there is nothing for them to do. Yeah, in my day we too had that "can't get experience if you can't get a job" Catch-22. But today many of the jobs that provided a foot in the door to the middle-class world of work, such as clerk-typists and administrative assistants and receptionists, don't exist anymore, thanks to everything from email and spreadsheets to sophisticated phone-answering systems. Other jobs have become, guess what, unpaid internships -- requiring prospective interns to have families who can afford to support them.
And those families? Don't even get me started on how people who used to be considered just "seasoned" and "experienced" are now just unemployable Luddites. But we are told that society NEEDS to set the retirement age higher and higher! So what exactly are people supposed to DO between the ages of, say, 45 and 70? Sit on the street corner and jingle a cup and chant, "Spare change, spare change"?
Some of my friends' kids are now in college (and accumulating vast quantities of student loan debt in the meantime). One is almost done with her nursing program, and I'm thrilled for her, but will she be crowded out of the field by immigrants who study for just a few weeks, manage to pass the U.S. nursing boards and then work for lower wages? Another is a biochemistry major interested in pathology or forensic science as potential careers. I'm inclined to encourage her to choose the latter, because I would think that some law-enforcement jobs will still require U.S. citizenship in the decades to come, but with digital imaging, it would be easy for labs to send "slides" halfway around the world for diagnosis by pathologists in lower-cost countries, leaving only minimum-wage technicians here to collect the samples and then forward the "sorry, you have cancer" messages to the American patients (who have higher and higher deductibles to meet before they can afford the treatment, but that's another story).
So ... people are working longer hours, more tethered to their jobs than ever before (a significant percentage of workers don't take all their vacation days, and what would happen to them if they refused the boss's text message while on the beach?), paying endlessly higher bills without getting larger paychecks, terrified they'll lose their jobs ... and we're all supposed to be infinitely creative and compete in the global marketplace? Especially after signing all those non-compete and intellectual-property agreements when getting the job in the first place?
Don't get me wrong; I greatly admire the maker culture and have tried to figure out where I fit into it. Nine days ago I went to my community's first Mini Maker Faire and was thrilled to see the outpouring of ideas and projects. But sometimes it's darned hard to feel creative and inspired when the bills have piled up too high. And the output I've always claimed as my own -- words written on a page -- have been devalued so much by the implosion of journalism and other forces that I'm sometimes tempted to rip up my entire backstory and start all over again.
Build a better mousetrap? Hell, we are all blind mice in the corporatocracy's trap.
This entry was originally posted at http://luscious-purple.dreamwidth.org/151730.html. Please feel free to comment either here or there.