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.

>A whole lot more of us are going to get involuntarily put out to pasture through no fault of our own eventually.

And that is going to have predictable consequences like increases in suicides, substance abuse, etc.

A job might "just be a job" but I'm growing tired of this trend online of treating work like it isn't important for most people's sense of worth, place in society, and overall mental health.

I think you should review your equation

reality - expectations - uncertainy = happiness/saddness

It might just be a job but someone living happy in good conditions that feels like the rug might get pulled under them for something they cannot control for is a lot more unerving even if your material conditions work out just fine in the end.

Also I think your being a little atomizing in the impact here. 1 Person losing a job is their problem, I agree. 60 thousand people losing there job is a problem for the government and society. 60K people is a lot and it has a ton of consquences. This is also leading into the prospects of we have these massively profitable corportations who are on the cusp of firing large % of high income people. Whats the tax implication of losing 60K engineering staff level saleries. Its atleast in the billions which is small in the total Federal revenue but if this is a sign of whats to come we have problems. Maybe those people go to different employment but change will effect a lot of local economies.

Granted I know you are really talking about the local emotional effect but the granular net effect is worth the conversation too.

Local journalism _feels_ like more than a job. Before my CS career, I was a photojournalist for a few different daily papers. It felt like important work. We were history keepers and story tellers for a community.

The issue is that several career tracks have some form of low pay, filtering, or outright hazing when you start out, with the promise that if you stick with the program, you will end your career at the top. Medicine, law, etc. If that promise is taken away, a lot of people on the job and in the education pipeline would be questioning whether it was worth the pain points (and not thinking about reforming and improving the entry level experience, lol). In the US this is one of the fears around socialized medicine.

Another problem is those career arcs are so long, where in something like tech or consulting, if you stick with it for 5-8 years you historically have a lot of seniority over new hires.

I agree that it's a job, but.. for most of humanity, people lived and worked in the same spaces with the same humans. The home was a unit of (pre) industrial production. Your neighbours were your partners, or at least involved in general economic activities with you.

Our human brains unsurprisingly still default to that, and it is quite understandable imo.

I tend to agree with the idea that one shouldn't define oneself by a job, especially since one's career is generally dependent on some combination of market forces, institutional gatekeepers, and other factors that are beyond one's control to varying degrees. However, people do tend to put that kind of personal investment into things they spend most of their time on, and especially things they had to spend a long time training for. In order to realize a world where people aren't defined by their career, we would need to first realize a world in which people weren't equal parts encouraged and forced to put most of their time and effort into one, which would require somewhat different economic arrangements than presently exist

Some things are more than just jobs - they are callings. Journalism and teaching are two. People wouldn't do them if they were just jobs, because they don't pay enough to cover the headaches.

Is that due respect? That may be your perception of work now, but how many people have much of their self esteem bound up in the work they do at their current place? I want employees and coworkers like that. But what you’re talking about is both life under Late Stage Capitalism and also a bit of blindness as though someone being squeezed by the death of newspapers could just find a different newspaper job.

> it's just a job

Considering what you're responding to, it sounds like you're suggesting people over 55 don't deserve to be respected or have a good position in life.

Hah I know a professor that retired and never stopped working on his projects. He just stopped handling paperwork at the university.

With all due respect, you're a kid, and not very knowledgeable about the world of careers that differ from yours.

Now, go code something nice.