Talks with the Mirror

Chapter VII: work

2019

You know that question: to be or not to be?

It's a total and utter scam. Even if you chose not to be, you would have to be! Because you have no choice in life but to be, and then sometimes some little prankster will trick you with the false hope of having a voice in the matter.

Then again, when it comes to the "to be" part, you have much to choose from. You can be an electrician, an architect, a chef, and - just to make sure your choices aren't limited to professions - an asshole.

You can't choose whether or not you will be lucky in life, but you sure as hell can choose who you will be in your life. And, in honor of this great benefit, I think you should be something worth-while... like a veterinarian making sure cat ladies don't lose their loyal companions.

Before even announcing the goal of this chapter I have already gotten side-tracked. 

I wanted to talk about professions. What I want to be! Or better, why I haven't been able to make up my mind about the matter.

I don't believe in having a single profession because I simply don't think that I could ever live only doing a single thing for the rest of my life. I am far too good to limit myself to a single career.

That's probably a sentence that every person who's too indecisive has said at some point in their life.

I am indecisive. I am. Unapologetically so. Have you seen the world we live in right now? Almost every job is being taken by some robot or computer, and it's becoming really hard to predict which job will be next to go. Imagine being a bunch of years in University learning to become a brain surgeon and then, ironically, on the day of your graduation, they publish the news of a brand new robot that will perform perfect operations with zero percentage error a hundred percent of the time. You will be fucked! You will be frustrated, mad as hell, and broke! But at least your first lost patient would never end up dying- the bright side.

I don't mean to scare anyone, but this is some scary ass shit! 

Have you heard about Mary the lady who took a job from a robot? No? Yeah... because she DOESN'T EXIST! No one can take a job from a perfect robot, meaning that these roles cannot be reversed!

And then, just when you thought that you could at least drive some stinky taxi, turns out Tesla is gonna take care of that too!!! And then your choices get more limited. Robots are producing blueprints and building big projects in just a week, and you can barely get out of the couch without the maid robot picking your frail body up and sitting you down on the toilet where the cleansing robot will take care of whipping the shit off your tooch.

Humans will just become the toys that robots play with. It's a huge Toy Story in real life kind of conspiracy theory.

Right now I work at a sports store. I can already spot how unnecessary the existence of my job position is. I tell people where things are. A computer could do that faster. I tell you the difference between different shoes (without actually being an expert). A robot could probably make you a custom one in three seconds. The whole fact of there being a physical store is unnecessary when all we actually need is to be a storage for all the items that people could just as  well buy online. All we gotta do is deliver... but wait! The Tesla self-driving delivery trucks with fingerprint ID have already been invented by that point, so your efforts are rendered useless. YOU ARE FIRED!

If you wanna have a job in the future, you have got to be smart. Think small, think smart, think anything that does not include a robot. Something that can't be done with batteries. Something that can't be done with WIFI.

Okay, that's pretty hard to think about... writing interesting books? Entertaining people's intellects. 

Something I could get behind. Now how to make it profitable.

Yall gotta start paying me per every fifty words typed!!!

Huge joke, but try and make a robot be as creative and afraid of the future as I am. Robots ain't got shit on my anxiety.