An Updated User’s Guide for the Aged and Alt-Brained
Chapter 3. On Jobs and Friendships
Lesson 5. Jobs, What a Mess!
And by mess, I mean in terms of the old French root term “mes,” which once translated to a portion of food or other substance. Many are starving for that portion of the economic pie in 2023. I don’t know about you, but I lost my last writing gig .o7 seconds after Chat-GPT 4 Pro hit the streets.
But the writing on the wall was tagged long before then, as back in 2010, I lost my print-profession gigs as everything went digital. So, following the wisdom at the time, I retrained to fit that time. Then, the times changed again about a decade later: jobless.
As Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of this guide discuss, don't assume any of this is your fault. We work, we retrain, we work again. That’s the cycle of human life on the working planet. The problem is that tech bros reinventing work never tell you why things are how they are and how they came to be. That part is glossed over. Instant gaslight!
“Gaslight,” in its modern usage, refers to a form of psychological manipulation where a person or a group covertly sows seeds of doubt in a target individual, making them question their memory, perception, or judgment, often evoking cognitive dissonance and other changes such as low self-esteem. The term originates from the 1938 play “Gas Light” and its film adaptations, where a husband manipulates small elements of their environment and insists his wife is mistaken or unwell when she notices these changes. — Chat GPT 4.0 Pro, 2023
Now that you know the definition of gaslighting as provided by my AI, let’s look at just one example of how the fumes of the light leak out in real life…
Example
In 1980, my job at IBM Corp was to retrain plastic-press operators to be programmers. These big, burly, lumberjack-shirted professionals had to become geeky computer science nerds overnight. That took work. They were all given the oldest, shittiest, most out-of-date code to work on. This code was described in letters strung together to make strings such as COBOL and FORTRAN, not modern programming languages like C and C++.
On the one hand, IBM could loudly proclaim resource-capacity building and investment in people while, on the other, glossing over the fact that they just sent hundreds of great jobs to Japan in exchange for older, shittier ones at home. Skills we need now may be lost forever. That’s just shameful in my mind.
That was the Great Gaslight of my day in the computer biz.
Discussion
As Chapter 2 of this guide tells, the gas emitted back then is nothing like now. Today’s techBro farts are ready to explode into a fireball that consumes us all. We are all told to have no fear; AI will bring more and better jobs. They forget to say to you, “for whom.”
For whom is not you.
I’d say if you are 50+ years old, the chances of finding retraining as an AI programmer with a corporation nowadays are nil. Your electronic resume won’t even pass the AI gatekeeper due to age. And even if they did, and you somehow managed to get hired as a programmer, it would not be as an AI programmer; no, you get stuck with Ruby On Rails or HTML (or worse). And if you are lucky, you earn 70 percent of the wage as someone 30.
However, the story I told here has a happy ending (one of the few I know of). Those COBOL programmers I trained were called out of retirement — or out of a fast-food dump to help with Y2K. Remember that great gaslight at the turn of the century? These big dudes, now with protected pockets, were the only ones who knew the code that would allegedly end the world as we knew it. Millionaires, all of them, overnight, as they were employed as consultants to find the Y2K bug. They were the only ones who knew how. Ancient wisdom won in this one instance. This story is not repeated today, as far as I am aware. If you know of a story like this, please do share!
Lesson 6. Your Friends are Not Your Friends Unless They Are
In this lesson, let’s discuss friends and friendships. Since I was 12 ½ years old and had just left the Woodstock Music Festival during the Summer of Love, 1969, friendships have been more important than food. And boy, do I love to eat!
Now, look at your Facebook page. How many “friends” are listed there? For me, 494. For you, maybe more or less, but I bet more than a few of those FB friends you have never met, never shaken hands with, never touched on the cheek, or never shared a meal with. In short, they are not your friends.
The gaslight here is that they are. Up until recently, the FB tag on the screen for this gaslight was “x, xxx FRIENDS.” Now, that same space is labeled “x, xxx FOLLOWERS.” My best guess for the change is that someone like me filed a complaint, or some UI/UX designer was from the same old school as us and thought, wait, that’s not right.
They are not your Friends nor Followers!
Discussion
Don’t be fooled by what you see on your screens. Your friends and followers listed on social media are anything but. They are just numbers on a screen unless you have touched or seen them while looking over your shoulder.
Now, of course, all of us know this, right? That’s not the point here. I am not upset about youngsters changing the English language to suit them; after all, we are passing the torch. It’s now their language. However, some skillful directions must be imparted to the young since even we, the Guardians of the Present Galaxy, will begin to believe that we are communicating with humans online instead of bots and fake friends/followers. I’d go into the technical details behind how these numbers are generated in the first place, but I would lose 90 percent of you right here, right now, so suffice it to say, the numbers are rigged. This is a casino game, after all.
Afterthoughts
I hope you are enjoying these lessons and lessons learned from an old man both enthralled by and disappointed in the tech advances of the day. But let me know how I am driving in the comments below, and I’ll crank out more chapters for this very fun (for me, at least) user guide very soon!
This chapter is dedicated to Mark, last name forgotten, who I retrained from being a press operator in 1980 to become a programmer, and that “programming” netted him millions in the end. It's the one retraining success story I know of, and after all of that, I’ve lost track of that lucky man.
In addition to sharing insights, I’m involved in a cause providing pizza to underprivileged children in Kathmandu, Nepal. If you wish to support them, please contribute through my [Buy Me a Coffee](https://www.buymeacoffee.com/nepalihipph) page; there is an excellent video on my simple project. Each donation brings joy to these children that you would not believe (but I will send you pics). Your generosity, big or small, makes a difference. Thank you for any support you can offer.