When I was a kid growing up I wanted to be a cartoonist.  My hero was pretty much Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, one of the funniest and most brilliantly drawn comic strips ever to grace American newspapers.  Then I chucked it all and decided I wanted to be a writer.  Basically I went from the dream of one dying profession where few people get paid well to the dream of another only slightly less terminal profession.  I used to get a lot of grief for this but now, one decade into the 21st Century, a hell of a lot of other people are starting to know how I feel.  Thanks to the forward march of technology, most of America has priced themselves into obsolescence.

It’s easy right now to blame the economy for everything, but there is a much more insidious trend in the American job market.  Think about it, when the dust settles, how many jobs are going to be lost or severely blighted by technology.  Manufacturing of course has been feeling that pinch for a long time.  Experts have been saying that America is on the road to a white collar economy for years.  But what is that white collar economy supposed to look like?  If you’re in health care or finance, good for you, enjoy your new status as a one percenter.  But what about the rest of us?  Engineers?  Unless you’ve got Chemical in front of that title, you may as well fill out an application at Starbucks.  Remember those heady days when a web designer could make piles of money?  Knowing HTML once meant guaranteed income.  Now all you need to know in order to create a web site is how to Google the words “Wordpress” and “template.”  What about graphic designers?  When I first moved to L.A. over a decade ago, one of my roommates was an art school grad plying his trade in the world of graphic design.  There was money in that because it required a lot of skill, technique, and know how.  Especially when using computers.  To be a graphic artist meant you had to actually know how to draw.  Now thanks to the advancement of Adobe Illustrator, anyone can cut and paste their way to a usable logo, advertisement, or even movie poster.  The experts now need not apply.

I could of course go on like this.  Blogs have killed journalists and magazine editors (don't worry, I see the irony of writing this in a blog), Apple has pretty much single handedly killed off film and music editors, not to mention record companies, although I don’t know many people mourning their loss.  Google and internet research has shuttered libraries.  And then to pile it on, thanks to the bad economy, thousands of companies have learned to make due with less employees, which means if this nightmare ever does rebound, there still won’t be enough jobs waiting for us.  So what’s left?  Everyday when I check my email, my homepage has some article about industries that are growing, or the best degrees to get for a job, or whatever.  And every damn one of them is in finance, health care, or a combination of the two.  Let’s see, I’m not a doctor or a nurse, I’m not an accountant, so that pretty much means I’m screwed.  With all of this great technology we’ve invented, it’s kind of interesting that no one ever stopped to think about its consequences on our way of life.

Maybe we all should have paid closer attention to American manufacturing.  First automation came in and took away thousands of jobs decades ago.  Then global outsourcing pretty much took care of the rest.  Well, here we are in the 21st century where technology has eliminated thousands of white collar jobs.  How long before global outsourcing takes care of that too?  What color collars will we be wearing then?  It’s interesting that in our culture, and I mean developed world culture, not just American culture, we’re so concerned about the latest and greatest that we never really stop to consider whether it is truly beneficial or not.  I keep seeing Obama go on and on about making our education system focus on science and the jobs of the future.  As I understand it, the jobs of the future are pretty much engineering drugs to keep us happy and working on or with some form of fuel technology.  Great, good for all of the kids who are good at math and science.  What about the kids who are creative, who like to paint or draw or play music and who maybe don’t have much interest in quantum physics.  Meet the welfare recipients of the future I guess.  What the hell are we doing to ourselves?

I’ll tell you one of the major problems that has driven us to this point,  our education system.  It is and alway has been about jobs.  It is a factory where we teach young people how to be commercially viable.  It isn’t an education in the sense of trying to figure out the world.  Most of my college grad friends can’t even spell Kierkegaard let alone know who in the hell he is.  But that doesn’t matter, as long as you qualify for the job of the future.  It’s a shame really, that we’ve reached a point in our evolution where we have so much information and so little knowledge.  Thanks to reckless enthusiasm we’ve single handedly made three quarters of our population redundant.  And this is progress?

I do have a solution to it all, although it is not one many people will be interested in: I’m out.  I hereby remove my hat from the ring.  I no longer have any interest in being commercially viable, I only have interest in a life that is humanistically relevant.  I will write and I will paint and I will probably end up on the street, but I frankly just don’t care anymore.  I refuse to become a medical records clerk because it pays and has dental just because I happen to be good at things no one cares about anymore.  I don’t know, maybe there are others out there who feel the way I do and who are willing to stand up to all of this insanity.  Maybe we can start some kind of cool revolution with a barricade in the street and a guy on top dramatically waving a giant flag.  Most likely though I’ll just end up poor and hungry, but, and here is the important but, not soul crushed and ashamed of myself.