B. Lorenzo Buckinchere
Nov 24, 2024
Employment is an essential resource that provides self-sufficiency and sustainability for individuals and families. People rely on jobs to keep the lights on and the refrigerator full.
They commute anywhere from 10 to 30 miles a day to punch their time into a time clock, and shuffle paper behind a desk for eight hours a day, just to maintain a sense of independence as a responsible adult.
The majority of the population within any given country have survived off working a 9 to5 job for over a century. But now, there seems to be a paradigm shift that definitely threatens the labor force as we know it.
The 9 to 5 grind, otherwise called employment, otherwise called indentured servitude, became more organized towards the turn of the 20th century. The 19th century would see the drafting of the 13th amendment under the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, that would abolish slavery for African Americans, and replace it with indentured servitude.
Under this system, immigrants, former slaves, poor whites and children alike were each paid a stipend to perform grueling physical labor. Only convicted felons were legally enslaved on American soil post abolition, a practice that continues through until this very day. Indentured servants worked anywhere from sixteen to twenty hours a day, under inhumane conditions.
This was really early in the game, and there were no laws at the time to protect employee rights and wages, so indentured servants were paid unfair and unlivable stipends. Many of them died due to overwork, dehydration and heat exhaustion.
Then came the 20th century, and with it came a paradigm shift from an agricultural economy to an industrial one. In this new economy, the forty hour work week was introduced, and so were minimum wage laws.
Child labor was outlawed, and it became mandatory for parents to send their children to school. Otherwise, they would be jailed for child neglect. Public schools were established for the children of the working class, paid for by their own property taxes.
John D. Rockefeller once famously said that he wanted a nation of workers, and not a nation of thinkers. Many have assumed this to mean that the children of the working class were receiving a different kind of education from that of the wealthy.
While the children of the wealthy are being privately homeschooled by a governess, who is teaching them how to invest and retain their wealth intergenerationally, the children of the working class are being forced into an indoctrination encampment where obedience and servitude is thoroughly ingrained in them, and they are exposed to a lot of bad influences from their peers.
This ensures that the cycle of poverty continues, and that the current working class will produce a working class for future generations. Only now, another paradigm shift has already begun, one that will forever change the landscape of the workforce as we know it.
With the advent of AI, tedious, repetitive tasks are delegated to the likes of Google Gemini and Chat GPT. This is especially true in manufacturing, construction and tech fields. All those jobs will be gone by 2040.
Thirty years from now, the 2020’s will be remembered as the era of the AI revolution, and it couldn’t have happened at a more convenient time. As more and more people are waking up to the ills of “Glorified Slavery,” they are turning to various forms of creativity for self-fulfillment as well as sustenance.
This would have otherwise reduced the numbers within the workforce drastically, except those numbers might have been cut regardless, as employees are made redundant in favor of AI.
As least now, former employees should have something to fall back on when the AI revolution runs its natural course. The path ahead will be a coarse one. This is due to the fact that although I believe everyone was born with natural talents, not everyone will get the memo in a timely manner.
Not only that, but there will be a lot of untapped potential that would take some soul searching, and that could take time. In the meantime, there will still be oligarchal expectations of societal consumerism, and if sales numbers should dwindle more than expected, there will be a push for people to work online so they can regain some income to spend.
It will be up to each individual to figure it out for his/herself, and decide if working online is something they want to do in the long term. Apart from that, most postmodern jobs will be in tech, whether as software programmers, or hardware engineers, but that’s only about five percent of the population.
If you are neither working online, nor indulging your own creative pursuits, you will likely fall through the cracks of society, and become a bum on the street. You will be lucky if you can find a commune who is willing to take you in.
That future status quo is not something far-fetched that might not happen for another hundred years, it’s right around the corner, and could possibly happen as soon as the end of the decade.
This is my final WordPress article for 2024. I will be going off on a two month hiatus, and will return at the beginning of February with all new articles and short stories for your reading pleasure.
In the meantime, my debut title, “The Buckinchere Collection (of short stories)” is now available for purchase in both Hardback and ebook. The Buckinchere Collection is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever you purchase books.
You can also purchase directly from me by visiting the following link; https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?5IzU47zPxUYGNX1TVoNenji31cQRLrUoa9c8tM2nLyT
Thank you all for your support, and happy solstice.
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