Terra Oblita
Deep roots are not reached by the frost
I learned to drive at the tender age of 7, on the back of a Ford 2000 tractor. Barely big enough to see over the front end, I spent many a day mowing, auguring, backhoeing, disking, and dragging around our 125-acre spread outside the beautiful town of Moulton, Texas. I often drove that tractor into town on errands, and by 14 I was charged with driving my siblings to school in Shiner.
When we spent summers in Houston, I was 12. At that point, I ran my uncle’s Goodyear motorcycle tire franchise—alone—during the week, and worked as a grease monkey at my cousin’s Sinclair filling station, back when full service was a thing.
I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t working. In all this time, I probably had a “job” about half the time. The other half I was a freelance stagehand, carpenter, electrician, camera operator, and later writer, producer and director. Of the “jobs’ I’ve had, only the first one at The Methodist Hospital was advertised. The others I created for myself by selling the company on needing my services.
The point here is that when I hear the young’uns whining about ‘no jobs,” my selective hearing kicks in and my brain goes on mute. Apparently, sitting in front of a screen in the air conditioning while sipping double-shot espresso lattes with pumpkin spice flavor juice is the only way to earn a living these days.
What has happened to the entrepreneurial spirit? When did folks become so dependent on someone else creating “jobs” for them? Where did the old work ethic run off to?
My personal work philosophy is that I have to generate some amount of income every day. I apply my skill set, think of something to do that would pay me—even a little—and then find someone willing to crack their wallet for it. Most days I manage to do it; some days I’m frustrated at every turn. In every case, I’ve produced something I can sell, if not today then another.
What I see these days is a bunch of delicate, privileged people who would rather power up the games with their very expensive and powerful electronic tool boxes, than stir themselves to work without a benefits package, commissary, and “mental health” days. Their hands are soft and their wan skin untouched by solar radiation.
To my mind, any food is good food, when survival is the goal. To these troglodytic creatures, though, there is a laundry list of things they won’t eat, or a manual’s worth of rules about how it is cooked and served. If it isn’t a pile of organic rabbit fodder lightly misted with extra-virgin olive oil from the slopes of Mount Olympus, well their delicate constitutions just can’t process it.
I haven’t had a paid vacation in decades. Sight-seeing is what I do after the work is finished. Travel is not something I pay for, it is an expense to hopefully earn more than it cost me to do the work. If I can combine the income from the gig with additional side revenue generated by the remote location, all the better.
What I see with the young’uns is the concept that work disrupts their play time. The only reason they get a “job” is to ensure the electricity stays on long enough to achieve the next level in Roblox. Sweating is what they do when surrounded by NPCs in a hostile digital environment.
Now I understand that I am being overly generalized here for rhetorical purposes, but I think the model of our current crop of “job” seekers is relatively accurate across many demographic groups, based on the tearful self-loathing “content” I see frequently posted on various platforms.
I suppose it’s not much different from my generation, whose driving ambition was to become a rock star. The difference I perceive is that the budding rock stars practiced after work and picked up gigs as a sideline.
These days, it seems the careerist fever is to emerge as a digital “influencer,” raking in millions by eating habanero peppers or sucking on soap balls. The big differences are that they will humiliate themselves to any degree for clicks, and will refuse to do anything else more productive and beneficial to society and themselves.
I guess this is entrepreneurial, if you squint just right and view it from an oblique angle. To my mind, however, it creates absolutely nothing of value, even if you call yourself a “creator”.
“Content” is filler, like adding bread crumbs to meatloaf. It increases the volume, but adds nothing to the seasoning or nutritional value of the meal. Even worse, that “content” is increasingly generated by machines with little more human input than a prompting paragraph. In a sense, it is nothing creating nothing to generate ad revenue for comatose sofa spuds on whose brains the “content” hardly registers.
About the most active thing those folks will do is live stream themselves screaming through waterworks at a world that refuses to hand them a “job” so they can afford to stream more content about how lousy their “job” is.
Kenneth John Freeman, a Cambridge classicist, summarized complaints about Athenian youth in his 1907 dissertation on ancient Greek education thusly, “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders…” This is often wrongly attributed to Socrates, but the sentiment is accurate.
For 3,000 years, us codgers have been complaining about dem whupperschnappers, so I suppose I’m in good company. That doesn’t excuse the fact that if the global economic situation changes suddenly, as it seems likely to do in the near future, those young’uns will have a less than even chance of making it through.
If you’re one of the young’uns, I ask you: what life skills have online games and content absorption taught you? Can you bake a loaf of bread or change the oil in your EV? If the store ran out of rabbit food and misty oil, would you choose to eat anything that looked reasonably digestible? Would your body actually be able to digest it? Would you have any clue at all how to survive without power and motorized transportation?
Have you ever earned revenue without a “job”?
Si mundus vult dicipi, ergo dicipitatur.
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The best film pairing for today’s screed is Swept Away (1974), written and directed by Lina Wertmüller, back when talent and merit got women into the director’s seat. The great Giancarlo Giannini puts in a brilliant performance in a satire about almost everything in society—class, skill, sex, power, and survival. Forget the bland and lousy Harrison Ford/Anne Heche remake. I won’t even mention the title. If you insist on a double feature, try Triangle of Sadness (2022), an outstanding Swedish film with a more updated take.
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I don't object to anyone preferring healthful food, but since the SNAP eligibility rules have been tightened up some may become less picky.
A young man I know has one year left on a chemical engineering degree. He sent out close to 200 resumes to companies asking for an unpaid summer internship. He got not one offer. If only he were not so white and male maybe he'd have better luck. Anyway, he's at work in the forests of Western NC, cleaning up the hurricane mess.
This reminds me of growing up in Spencer, Iowa, in the fifties.
One of my father's favorite sayings was, "Root hog or die."
That sounds to our ears now like a hard way of looking at things but it was how everybody felt.
And it didn't stop any of us from having fun, when there was time for that.