As it fucking should.

And before you shrug and go “great, jobs are bullshit”:

Jobs, for all their cruelty, provide:

•structure (“I know where to be at 9”),

•community (office friendships, shared memes, gossip),

•identity (“I’m a nurse / teacher / carpenter,” for the lucky ones),

•a script (“I know what next year roughly looks like”).

Take that away and you don’t get instant utopia. You get a psychic freefall.

Imagine millions of people waking up one day structurally unnecessary to the economy, with no replacement narrative in place. Not “You’re free now,” but “The system doesn’t know what to do with you, please manage your own despair.”

That’s not liberation. That’s cruelty on a scale our nervous systems are not built for.

Think about Appalachia when the textile mills closed. Everywhere.

EDIT: for people who didn’t pay attention to my “think about Appalachia” comment.

Just because you can manage your own structure, community, and identity without a job doesn’t mean the people around you can too.

Especially older people who have spent their lives in the American capitalist system, which tells you over and over you are defined by the job you do and the things you buy with the money from that job. Hell, any of you with older relatives probably know somebody who retired, didn’t know what to do with themselves, declined and died a few years after.

And especially teenagers and young adults who were raised with the expectation of “grow up, go to college, get a job, raise a family” - and who suddenly won’t be able to get a job, as is already happening with the death of entry-level jobs and the increasing uselessness of college degrees - and have to define themselves and their future without ever having learned the tools to do so.

And when people lose the structure that gave their lives meaning, a lot of them find new meaning in their race, sex, or religion. And that’s how you get nationalist / fascist uprisings.

Because, going back to Appalachia, the reason Vance country is so deep fucking red is because “free trade” and neoliberalism sent all their jobs overseas and let Big Pharma addict their communities to opioids for profit, and because Democrats did two things about it, jack and shit.

You do not want to see what America turns into when half our jobs disappear into data centers and MAGA influencers convince millions of young men to blame immigrants and the left for their lack of a future. But I’m afraid you’re going to.

  • medgremlin@midwest.social
    1·
    13 hours ago

    I think I need to boil this down a bit. Some people lack the emotional intelligence and personal convictions to make meaning for themselves. This is not a bad thing. I do not think less of people for having shortcomings compared to others, I see it only as variance between people. Just as I do not think less of my patients with diabetes or heart disease or substance use disorders, I do not think less of people for not being able to adjust to sudden changes in their lives with perfect poise and rationality. Everyone has differing strengths and weaknesses, and there is no shame to be had for any of them.

    For your argument about choices in life: There are many American children and young adults that pick their education and future career based on external influence/instruction or necessity rather than actually choosing for themselves. Most of the people I know that joined the military out of high school did so because they would have been homeless and unemployed if they didn’t. (I graduated high school in 2009, by the way). So there really isn’t all that much in the way of true free will in this country unless you come from a wealthy family or take on a lot of risks and debt forging your own path. This isn’t even touching on the rampant propaganda in our youth telling us that we will amount to nothing without a college degree.

    For the point of being a physician in a post-work world, a lot of people are trying to replace physicians with AI despite the fact that these overgrown algorithms simply do not have the capabilities to do the job properly…but it’s not like they’re taking that into consideration for any other jobs/professions either.