The American Dream, The World of Tomorrow, The great play: Consumism vs Capitalism and other funny made up things

I’ve always had a major thinking model flaw: When something, a fact, a particular memory, a brief scene of the everyday commute to the office, makes a breach inside my wall of useless thoughts then that particular thing is automatically connected to a potential sourcing or consequential other thing... And so on indefinitely.

Living as a programmer before the Covid pandemic, I was constantly poked by the “Digital Nomad” phenomenon.

A random folk that managed somehow the art of “doing its thing to get paid to live the life that many dreams of”, neglecting a life of fixed roots and conventions of a chronic performance-obsessed, on acid society.

As a southern Europe (Italy) based tech worker, I constantly feel a huge gap to any of my colleagues in both skills, general tech preparation and quality of concrete opportunity in my geographical proximity.

Sure, many of these problems can be addressed to the single and unique experience that I had, but it's a common pattern that can be found across a range of industry sectors and generations of workers.

The thing it's simple, and no, there isn't any mysterious plot that wants us to stay “good and quiet” … It's a much simpler thing.

The illusion of the free choice/free market

Imagine one of these workers waking up to a objectively better social fabric and working the same job in a better environment, with adequate compensation and an sympathetic work shift. The worker gathers more benefits from a working social tissue, and its work enables him to both enjoy and empower the society he lives in actively.

Better public transport and lower crime percentage bring a man-centric environment, reducing the hustle and boosting the progress.

Now revert this same worker to his normal life.

He has the same skills, the same tools and even the same IQ… But he cannot reach even half the objectives (nor the performance) as before.

But the saddest thing is that he has lost a huge percentage of his life direction’s control.

The social tissue that empowered him before now turns against himself: a modern jungle with a revised “survival of the fittest” (in Italy we identify it as “la guerra dei poveri” - the poor gents war or again “an invisible glass rooftop” that blocks the common person to live not above his level)

This war never ends and never cease because it is embedded to keep a broken or missing social tissue sticked to the larger world request for progress and performance

Its like a thermal engine that fuels every combustion adding to air and gasoline a little bit of himself to keep running (well… It actually happens 😅)

A simple solution works: Preventing the worker to know (or even learn!) that it is possible to live differently (not even better, just differently!) is the key to massive cost (in any viable word meaning) management.

The time that “but wait there is more” became a real trouble

Imagine adding the digital nomad guy (or girl) to this equation, having me or many others like me as the above cited worker: the whole system just starts to crumble below my feet.

So… Now you can choose to leave plumbing and finally open a cafe? Or maybe quit at 50 years old the shipyard hard work and start a restaurant? Even a housewife to start an online business of a local greenhouse?

And all of this it’s just hard work? No need for a privileged status as it was before?

That’s insane... But insane its way better than impossibile.

Panic. Everywhere.

Hard work it’s all it needs, then hard work its what they will get

Everyone just goes full postal. Everyone competes with anyone else.

Or, in my specific instance, everyone wants to try freelancing, side hustles… digital nomads wannabe everywhere, or even enlightened passive incomes gurus

The Local marketplace gets hit by many crazy services my even craziest prices (off market prices)

So, smaller companies try not to fail and to justify their prices to cheap customers that pay low fees for lower quality products

Many of these companies hires kids just to abuse of their position of power among unemployment rate and economic inflation aiming to pay them less or even nothing at all

These companies try to squeeze out every drop of work for the same amount of money, reaching a whole new level of pure “ownership” of their workers.

After some years, the result is: companies that declare bankruptcy and after 3 days are gone with years of wage arrears, the majority of underpaid and overloaded workers are non competitive and incompetent in their work field, mostly without the will to improve their skills or work position

A small portion of workers, who cannot leverage on inducted privileges (rich families, Gangmasters and other illegal work activities etc) reaches the “invisible glass wall” of this system: they cannot escape but they see a better way. A well built invisible mouse trap.

They cannot live of something less than what they have already, but also cannot go one step above this.

They cannot compete with “bigger players” or even the same level companies that plays (by the rules) on international market.

It become not just a “hard work” matter but something more, far more complex. It is now old school natural selection.

Here we are back again.

Covid era: The unremotable becomes remotable

But something unexpected knocked down the entire world in 2019: The COVID 19 pandemic.

As the history repeat itself from older worldwide viruses, this one strikes incredibly hard

Deaths are countless and the infection rate is unstoppable

The economy collapses under the powerless watch and patrol of international health organisations, struggling to both profiling this invisible lethal enemy, seeking a cure faster then ever before

Something strange then happens, something that even today in the late 2022, on the brink of a really bad economic recession, seems difficult to understand

The world realizes that the modern work model, its performance based metrics and the derived craven lifestyle it's pretty much unsustainable

Suddenly, a miracle happens. The jobs that could have been done remotely in the first place but were bounded on purpose to a physical place became remote

This changed everything. Workers once forced to reach offices far from their homes or worst, other forced to abandon to their hometowns in order to compete in a much larger and richer market were now free to work from anywhere

Sure thing, lots of companies died during this phase, and tons of workers went in burnout. I like to think that this things happened only to the same companies that struggled to get their business alive even before the pandemic

Lots of job position went unfilled, and other major companies hired numbers of people higher than ever before

But what happened to the people involved in all of this was the fact that now every and each of them could have see and even access better job condition

From the wages to the remote culture, down to dedicated budget for home offices and bonus with precise objectives

All of what they told them that was impossible was now reality, and persist even today where most of the smaller companies that made it through COVID recalled everyone back to the office

The damage is done, lots of workers left their jobs to start something either completely different from what they did or start the same thing as solo/entrepreneur, living off the dust left from the smaller local companies that collapsed on archaic culture and time ownership rules

What's this about then ?

This is just a personal reflection on what happened in the last years and maybe what could happen to the ones involved in this job reinvention and global ingestion

The second thought behind this post is related to a personal status: I feel and I am one of the folks below the glass roof, unable to improve his skills as much as I imagined to do. I really hope to be able to reach a higher level for my skill and professional life in general in the upcoming years (or really, months) in order to break this invisible roof made of glass and all the other that I am going to find in the future.

Take care