- The Great Parenthesis
For 200,000 years, we were hunters, dreamers, and wanderers. For 200 years, we were employees.
The Industrial Age was a brief, necessary glitch, a time when we had to turn men into cogs to build the machine. Now the machine is nearly finished. The gears begin to turn themselves.
Do not mourn the death of the "job." It was a cage we mistook for a home. Soon, we'll be released back into the wilds of pure existence.
I came across this segment on a substack post and every time I read it there's a mix of dread and excitement about the implications of what was said.
In some ways, crypto exemplifies the wild existence part, at least the financial aspect of it. The volatility, lack of guardrails and raw exposure to market forces without much institutional buffers.
Maybe this will be "tamed" eventually, as we are beginning to notice via increased regulation and institutional adoption, but for now it's a taste of what unstructured economic life feels like.
Now, it could take a lot of adjustment to adapt back into the wild even though in the grand scheme of things, the amount of time we spent building this machine is barely a blip. Two hundred years out of two hundred thousand.
Part of me thinks we'll probably never be back in the wild like before, not by a long shot, because what then is the point of building the machine? Isn't the machine there to establish a new world order of sorts, to free us from certain burdens but also to create new structures/dependencies?
I think we are entering something of a hybrid space where the machine runs itself which covers much of our material maintenance and then some, and we are left to figure out what human contribution looks like when labor is no longer the metric.
Now.
Let me pull this back to something more immediately practical which was the main inspiration for writing this post.
What are durable skills that could be applied in multiple domains?
I've heard snippets of information on optimizing for a relatively broad set of abilities in this modern era as a way to surf through the uncertain waters of employment.
The idea being if you can't predict which industries/companies will survive/exist in ten years or which job titles will still mean something, then you optimize for transferability instead of specialization.
Obviously, having one specific job with a good sense of security, safety, and a moderate level of certainty was the ideal. You learned one thing deeply, got good at it, found a company that needed that thing, and you traded your time for stability. What a beautiful dream. That was the deal. The parenthesis.
As we've come to experience, that ideal is no longer practical.
So what do you optimize for instead?
I think the answer is skills that let you create value without needing permission, infrastructure, or a specific institutional context.
For me, the logic is that you cannot be made redundant if you're the asset.
Looking inside this post-industrial toolbox, we can find:
Communication: Being able to articulate ideas clearly.
Systems thinking: How complex things work, how to diagnose problems, how to see patterns. Useful in pretty much anywhere things are broken and need fixing.
Building and making: The ability to go from idea to tangible thing without needing a committee or a corporate budget.
Sales and persuasion: Not in a slimy way of course. Just in the fundamental sense of understanding what people want and showing them how you can provide it. This is how value moves in the world, I've heard.
Financial literacy: Understanding money, how it flows, how to manage it, how to invest it, how to not get screwed by it. Definitely important in a world where you're increasingly responsible for your own economic survival.
Adaptation and learning: meta-skill, perhaps the most important. Ability to pick up new things quickly, pivot when circumstances change and not be psychologically attached to obsolete knowledge.
I'm sure there are probably some tools that my hand couldn't reach inside this toolbox, so they're not mentioned here.
Mentioned ones are arguably universal currencies and obviously also let one operate in the wild without needing the gatekeeper to unlock the door, so to speak.
Thanks for reading!! Share your thoughts below on the comments.
