Comment by Angostura
20 hours ago
I was a journalist in the old days. With all due respect it was mote than just a job. It was a community, a calling. It felt important. I went out to dinner with my first ever boss and some original colleagues a couple of months ago and had a great time.
I wonder if it's just me, but before the 2000s, a lot of jobs felt important, society felt important, institutions felt important.. it's evaporating now.
There was a lot more pride in professional work yeah. People cared about doing a good job. I'm not quite sure what caused the decline over 3+ decades but you could probably throw a dart at "the internet" and probably hit something partially related.
I think theres just MUCH more depression over the much more visible reality that your upper managers don't care about you or the work you put out. Especially now with AI companies pitching them a salivating dream of doing the work of 100 with 10.
> I'm not quite sure what caused the decline over 3+ decades
Finance. Everything is a number to be optimized that must constantly grow. The US abandoned antitrust, worker protections, social safety nets, and more in the name of greed.
For workers to care you need to treat them as humans. People care about a team and a family that care about them back.
The mythical story of the person who started in the mailroom and worked their way up is gone. The mailroom, secretary, custodian, and as many roles as possible have been replaced with contractors without benefits or any future in the building they currently work in who will facelessly cycle out in a few months for another contractor.
Employees have been abused too much to believe the lies. If I work twice as hard, my reward is a sub-inflation raise and no realistic hope of promotion. Feedback employees give is ignored, so there's no motivation to push to improve things. The management class has a desperate dream of all people being fungible so they can throw them out and get cheaper ones, and fungible is what you get - if you want a generic interchangeable cog, that's what you get, but don't complain about how the cog doesn't "care enough".
No the decline is because people woke up to the fact that it doesn't matter if you take great pride in your work and work unpaid overtime and always produce quality output: you will still get laid off when the economy explodes or when some VP decides to cancel your whole product division. It doesn't matter. You are a sucker if you go over and above every day to the benefit of the company.
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I was strangely ahead of my time in a negative way. Spending way too much time alone with computers, didn't care about society, jobs were just jobs, life was meaningless. I recovered and feel much better and much more stable although I was never properly socialized so I still think society is "meh" and jobs are just jobs but some part of me wonders if all of you normal guys are starting to get depressed or something. Many things people say remind me of my 15yo self.
I had multiple phases in my life. Simple min wage jobs, long isolation, IT jobs.
Even in bakery, coffee shop, repair, deliveries.. you feel happy about your simple skills, happy to serve people that need a little bit of what you do, even serving coffee quick and clean.. in a team of people who know how to organize themselves. It can be exhausting, limited.. but it felt better than digital gray fog we're going in (graeber would say bullshit jobs).
And previous generation had even a different culture, my mother keeps telling me how warm and fun it was to work in the 70s. No easy job, 1000~ customer restaurants, but the way people approached jobs, belonging, connection.. was different. I witnessed the cold privatization of her building around 2000s, it became more a factory than a place to drink coffee and eat, everything was stiffer and came from high above management who didn't work with employees.
I would say the problem is that it NOW is just a job... it used to be the fourth estate
Without getting too political, these were the days when the press controlled information and appointed themselves arbiters and gatekeepes of information.
The internet and free information showed them up for what they really were: biased cavemen like everyone else, and the aura vanished.
That is more or less completely untrue.
Lol, how righteous! You were a propagandist for state and company, full of lies and half truths. The amount main stream journalism has gotten wrong in the last two decades wouldn't fit on the side of a bus, you ran cover for the powerful and destroyed anyone they deemed a threat. And you've been purely ideological without any regard for reason or truth. I'm glad journalism is dying, it's been too corrupt for too long.
No, it’s more like: who is lying, Jared Kushner or Vanity Fair? The stakes are large for both, but we’re better off compared to how the regime prefers to suppress that.
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It had an aura precisely because journalists were the arbitrators of truth, so denial of real information elevated it