9 min read

This is a story about dream jobs...

Why aren't nurses who work in geriatric care the best paid people on the planet? When humans are old and shrivelled up, senile, incontinent and are simply an inconvenience, getting in the way of children receiving their inheritance, geriatric nurses are there mopping up the poop and vomit, and generally trying to ease the suffering and discomfort of the age-ravaged creatures who are long past their sell-by date. On the face of it, palliative care seems a thankless task, and the low pay would certainly back that up.

But what about nursery nurses and nannies? These people also mop up the shit and puke of those who can't look after themselves, but the tiny tots that they care for are all cute and brand new. People who work in childcare are similarly badly paid, but maybe that's because it's supposedly fun and rewarding, playing with children all day.

How can this be? How can it be the case that somebody who looks after those who are dying gets paid badly, but then so is a person who looks after those who have their whole lives ahead of them?

Perhaps it's the case that anybody who deals with human waste is badly paid. Certainly when we examine the remuneration of garbage collectors and cleaners, we find that these people who scrub human stains from the world, are very badly paid. The people who unblock sewers and those who work in sanitation are hardly big earners, and might in fact be in a similar pay bracket to the people who look after children and old people.

You would have thought that having to deal with dirt, grime, death and bodily fluids would carry a pay premium that would see the people I just mentioned, amongst the highest paid there are, but this is not the case at all.

Hang on though! What about musicians, poets and writers? Sure, there are a handful of successful individuals who are paid mind-bogglingly humongous sums for the art that they create, but the very vast majority of people who have chosen music and wordcraft as their profession, will find themselves very poor indeed. Think how many struggling writers there are. Think how many people there are who play in bands, but barely earn a single cent for their trouble. How many people reciting wonderful poetry are able to call it a well paid profession?

So if writers and musicians are badly paid too, but they don't have to deal with bodily fluids and rotting trash, then what exactly is the common link?

Do you think it's time spent studying? Do you think it's qualifications? Well, many musicians will have spent tens, if not hundreds of thousands of hours mastering their instruments. Music theory is not trivial. Music theory and harmonics are governed by discrete mathematical rules. Can you really say that a corporate lawyer or accountant is more qualified than somebody who has dedicated their life to music? Of course not.

So what is it? What is the rule that decides whether you will be well paid, or you will struggle to make ends meet?

Well, my theory is that the more alien and dehumanising your job is, the more you will be paid. Humans have caring and nurturing instincts built into them. We will naturally feel sympathy for those in discomfort and pain, and we will want to help if we can. Humans have a dislike for waste and mess, and we will want to keep things clean and ordered. We have evolved the instinct to not live in piles of our own filth. We have even evolved the social instinct to create art that binds us together. Whether it's trancelike-state inducing beats and chants, paintings on cave walls, or the telling of stories that are our very earliest form of preserving our history, myths and legends. It's human to want to perform, to sing, to entertain.

What innocent young child really can imagine that they would want to grow up and get a job massaging numbers in spreadsheets or editing the minutiæ of legal contracts? What the fuck does your bullshit job even entail? What the fuck is it going to say on your motherfucking gravestone? How the fuck would you even go about explaining what you do to your grandmother?

And so, we now have an army of the living dead who are, in the words of David Bolchover, switched off, zoned out. This is the shocking truth about office life. Nobody gives two fucks about their job or their employer. There is no job satisfaction. The jobs are alien, dehumanising.

What do these armies of disillusioned people do all day? Well, they read and they listen to music. Some of the most cultured art patrons that we are lucky enough to have in the world, are just bored people sat at their desks with glazed eyes, wondering what they're going to have for lunch.

But then what? What happens next?

Well, these people start dreaming about becoming musicians, writers, artists, poets and pursuing all manner of things that will connect them with the aesthetic and creative elements that their bullshit daily humdrum gives them precisely fuck all of.

What even is a journalist? Well, the clue's in the name: journalist. As in day. As in somebody who writes a journal every day. That's all it is. That's all it takes to be a writer. You don't have to be qualified to be a writer. Just write. Every day.

There's a myth that you can't do anything without studying, that has been perpetuated by the professions. It's true that you can't become a lawyer or an accountant without studying, but those are bullshit jobs with bullshit professional bodies whose job it is to limit how many people enter the profession every year, in order to maintain false scarcity and prop up their salaries.

It's utter bullshit. We don't need any lawyers & accountants. Without builders, there are no houses. Without farmers and fishermen, there is no food. Without weavers and seamstresses there are no clothes. Without lumberjacks and miners, there is no wood and coal to keep ourselves warm and to cook our meals. Everything else is just intellectual masturbation. Unnecessary bullshit made up jobs that add nothing of value.

So, as people are realising that the fact that they didn't go to an Oxbridge university to study English, or at least attend a creative writing course, but yet they can still write a blog and entertain their friends and family on Facebook and Twitter, the value of journalists has been completely eroded.

Yes, it's a shame that The Guardian and The Observer newspapers are going down the shitter, whether they add a paywall or not. Yes it's a shame that a lot of friends and people who I know, who are extremely talented and have dedicated their whole lives to the pursuit of journalism and writing careers, are finding that there's just no way that they're ever going to earn a decent salary doing what they love.

And that's just it. That's the kicker. That's the real kick in the teeth. As soon as you do something you love, you'll find there's no money in it. We all want to be footballers, singers, food critics, cinema critics, writers, journalists, poets and every other job where you fuck about doing nothing more than entertaining, informing, educating, inspiring.

We all love the thrill of the limelight. We all love dressing up. We all love exotic locations. We all love to seek new sensations. We all love to meet interesting people. We all love to talk and write about what we're passionate about. We all love to make art that expresses our deeply felt human emotions that can't be articulated using the blunt instruments of words.

If you do what you love and it's necessary, like nursing, then you'll be paid just enough to survive. If you do what you love and it's unnecessary, like art, then you'll not be paid anything at all. It's a race to the bottom. We can all stick a paintbrush on a piece of paper and produce something passably artistic.

The arts used to be the preserve of the aristocracy, but with the democratisation of the arts through the digital medium, my crude drawing of a penis can be reproduced infinitely many times across every computer screen on the planet. I can write a library full of books, and they're all immediately in print and available to be read by anybody, at any time, for free, because of the limitless power of the digital printing press that is the internet. Why the fuck would anybody pay anything for art anymore?

Of course, scarcity still has value, and a few super-high profile artists will continue to produce original artworks in the form of paint on canvas, art installations and live performances. These artists are the courtiers in the entourage of the plutocracy. You have about as much chance of becoming one of these people as you have of being struck by an asteroid, twice.

As the global recession deepens, the amount of people who are able to just about scrape a living as a freelance writer or a busker will drop away to nothing, and the arts will once again be the preserve of the sons & daughters of the very wealthiest, who have the monetary means to pursue things which society largely deems worthless.

The Huffington Post has shown the future for journalism, where an army of bloggers are leveraged to provide the same kind of re-hashed reporting of the stories that are churned out by a handful of news agencies who are still able to have people on the ground. Your dreams of being a war correspondent are over. Even your dreams of being a lifestyle blogger are looking pretty hopeless.

There is a vast oversupply of opinion and wordcraft and music and art and everything else that's fun to create. There is no longer any room to do something you love. As soon as you derive any kind of job satisfaction, that's going to be the last pay rise you ever get.

Don't you get it? It's a race to the bottom. See you there!

Tags: #writing #socialmedia #capitalism #career