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I still want to be a rock star
Thought it was funny how in different media, working some corporate job in a cube farm was portrayed as this depressing inevitably of life, that you’ll hate your job and yourself. For as bad and soul-crushing as *it is, having a roof over your head and food in the fridge is not a bad prospect.
Edit: that -> it. White collar jobs have their own drawbacks of course
It’s obviously better to have financial stability than to struggle but a lot of cuber jobs really are pretty soul crushing if you can’t force yourself to buy into whatever bullshit corporate is slinging
Remember how miserable Al Bundy was, with his entry-level job that supported a wife, two kids, a house, and two cars?
I like those shows where the house and/or livelihood the main family has would be fairly unrealistic.
For example, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was The King of Queens (where the main characters worked as a delivery driver and corporate secretary respectively) and George Lopez (where the main characters worked at an airplane production and as an event planner).
Of course, the odds of are these people, if they were real, eventually could not pay the loans they took out and lost their homes by the end of the 2000s.
At least you’re better than me, I wanted to be a fighter pilot as a kid after playing the Ace Combat games. My thought process was basically fast jet = cool. Then when I got older and realised that will involve killing people if war ever broke out and noped out of that very quickly.
DCS is a real joy in VR, though it’s becoming increasingly clear I need a better headset than my og vive.
I wanted to be an Astronaut. Turns out it’s mostly janitorial work in the worst OH&S environment imaginable.
I wanted to be an astronaut so bad when I was a kid.
Back then, I thought humans would be places other than Earth and Low Earth Orbit, though :sadness:
The games stories are usually very anti war, but as you said it doesn’t stop the military fetishizing people. My PC is definitely not strong enough for DCS lol. Also my country has basically no use for the brand new fighter jets they have, so they are using them and their special camera modules to hunt down poachers. Just think of how inefficient it is to spy on poachers in a Mach 2 fighter plane.
I got even closer than you, lol. A couple years out of high school I applied and got taken to some base to test. There were little games and aa paper test, they rate you on how you did (there were math games, flight controller games, one game where you had to do some math on heating a house on the fly, one where you had to determine if you had enough fuel to make it.)
I apparently did very well, but I was just a little too tall to fit in the trainer planes and ultimately for the fast jets. They “offered” (pending medical and fitness approval) me a direct entry into an air traffic controller commission and some military college. I thought that was cool and then I could do that after leaving the military, but I got fucking work related asthma from my job! Got passed over after some medical test, cant remember what its called something like methane choline?
I felt bitter at the time, but looking back now I’m glad I couldnt do it. I didnt end up doing air traffic controller school in just civilian world, but maybe could give it a shot for after the pandemic if air traffic ever goes back to normal, lol.
I’m pretty sure almost nobody in corporate America actually “uses their degree”. It’s all on the job experience. Obviously not talking about doctors and shit, but come on, do you really need a business degree to call people and try to sell things to them?
Eh, it is sorta still that way for degrees. Like only ~30-40% of people with just a bachelors or below end up in the same field their degree is in.
The problem is that there is a lot more jobs that require advanced degrees now. You can’t even get an interview for a chemistry gig without a masters in most of the United States now. Back in the 1990’s national labs were hiring anyone with a pulse and a bachelors. It is so insane now at national labs that even entry level positions require PhDs.
Its offloading of training to employees. Training is expensive for corporations and conditions have deteriorated enough that no one sticks around at 1 company for a career (because they dont give out raises, etc. you know the reasons why). Churn is expensive for companies and therefore they want to decrease the cost of employee churn - enter formal post-sec education where the employees themselves have to pay $10k or more for just technical education that they wouldve previously been given as part of on the job training, nevermind needing a masters for some of this stuff. Side benefit is that your workers are now indebted and precarious before they even enter their first job, you can treat them even worse and maybe some quit but the reserve army of labor now all have standardized training and education so churn isnt as big a problem.
