The following is a guest post. Enjoy!
The notion of the 20th century career is getting left in the dust. It used to be that, in order to make money reliably and to retire well, you had to report into a workplace every single day, for most of the rest of your life. This is because the workplace was owned by someone with money, who created a product or service which was used by enough people that their payments were sufficient to make that individual or individuals very rich, with money left over to pay a stable of workers such as yourself.
But this put people in an awkward and increasingly dissatisfying position. Karl Marx, the great economic philosopher, described the inherent need for human beings to work, and to see the best aspects of themselves in the work they did. For instance, let’s say you were a carpenter who built tables. Your work would be most satisfactory, said Marx, if you built tables which were strong, reliable, sturdy, and attractive. These qualities were valuable to you, the producer, because they represented your own best qualities, aspects of yourself that you strove to exhibit at all times and in all places.
But the problem with capitalism, said Marx, is that it tends to push the worker away from his or her meaningful work. If you were a great table builder, as you would become if you were able to successfully put those great qualities into the tables you built, you would be likely to sell lots of tables. Suddenly you’d have a waiting list. You’d have to hire employees to keep up with demand, maybe even build a factory. Suddenly, you are spending more of your time working as an administrator, trying to streamline the production of your tables to maximize the output demanded of you by the market, and by your growing overhead costs and payroll. What happened to the satisfaction you used to receive from making a great table?
In the 20th century, this process went into overdrive. The innovators became the richest people on the planet, and their underlings, the hundreds of thousands of workers they employed, were no closer to doing hard work producing products which represented their values than the bosses were. Today, many workers don’t need to work for a centralized corporation in order to make satisfactory wages, freeing them to find ways of making meaningful products (whatever those are) of their own, a process no longer directly related to survival.
If you have broken out of the 20th century career mold, what you do with your spare time is up to you. But how you make your money, through methods available online, is open to discussion. Freelance writing and design and other work, selling stuff you make or already own, creating content which you can monetize through Youtube or other methods, the list could go on and on. If you learn methods employed by bloggers, internet creatives, and web investors, it’s likely that your income could be totally replaced, setting you free from a time-sucking 20th century career and opening you up to a new way of life in the 21st century.
