"Career" has been sold as "that thing that gives you purpose." The abstraction of work, however, has also abstracted that purpose.

The synonyms of "career" include "vocation" "calling" and "walk of life." "Work" has synonyms including "toil" "drudgery" and "grind." The rebranding is only as good as the experience. As companies get larger, the bonds between the employer and employee become more tenuous and each individual part matters less and less. And unfortunately, as companies get larger, they get more efficient, have more buying power and tend to outcompete smaller firms.

We've got seven employees now. There's one of them whose absence wouldn't blow a giant hole in our organization, and that's because she's a part-time mom doing fill-around-the-edges work who has only been with us a couple months. The rest of them? Wax ebullient about their jobs on a daily basis, are strongly driven in pursuit of their "calling", and incorporate their profession deeply into their self-images. When there is a clean, clear connection between "thing you want to do" and "thing you get paid for" it's a lot easier to show up and get paid.

That all goes out the window when you're one of eighteen IT support personnel at T-Mobile Bothell, or when you're Associate 24 at Boost Mobile Store 533. What's your purpose? To earn a paycheck. What do you put up with for that paycheck? More than you want. What does that paycheck do for you? Less and less. This is something "the industry" was terrified of before the pandemic: young men, en masse, had discovered that the costs-benefits analysis of "Associate 24" vs. "I spend my days in my parents' basement teabagging n00bs in CS:GO" lean strongly towards getting gud at Counterstrike.

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'cuz here's the thing: if you rely on smoke and mirrors to keep your galley slaves at the oars, the universe turned on the lights back in March 2020. It was more fulfilling helping to design airports than helping to design Hooters. It was more fulfilling mixing shitty indie films than mixing shitty reality television. It is now more fulfilling to spend 80 hours a week melting bronze etc than it is mixing shitty reality television, despite the fact that shitty reality television paid me dumbly handsomely. Once you subtract the economics from the problem, it's just not something I want to put up with. Sitting at a million dollar console and controlling what seven million people hear? Yeah, that's pretty cool. But there's way too much bullshit that goes with it.

The bullshit has been increasing and the economic incentives have been decreasing. Full stop.

Western culture has been built on this premise that if you work hard, you'll get ahead. That contract was broken by Nixon, shoddy repairs have been attempted by every Democrat, and every Republican since has torn it down further. You have to understand, though, that the Republicans don't care. Their model is feudalism; they want rich people to inherit wealth and title and serfs to live nasty, brutish and short.

Their problem is the serfs are figuring out they'll never have wealth and title, though, so why break your back scything wheat for the lord of the manor? There's a copse at the end of the field where you can lay in the shade and watch the clouds go by and if the yeoman catches you he'll only whip you a few times.