We're All Pimps Now

What does a working life look like for young people today? When I was a boy and forever being asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” it was expected that the answer would involve something stable and professional-seeming. A doctor, lawyer, maybe an executive of some sort like my dad, who worked at AT&T doing something incomprehensible. A career back then meant picking a profession, getting yourself hired by some practice or firm, and, in success, staying there for the duration of your working life, at the conclusion of which one could be expected to receive a small party, a modest token of appreciation, and a pension generous enough to allow a comfortable, if not luxuriant, retirement for a few years before a painless death in one’s sleep at a condo somewhere in South Florida.

My son graduated from college last week, and my daughter is a year behind him. The working environment into which they are entering is so different from the one I headed into as a young man that I don’t even know how to advise them. So many of the jobs that may have been attractive a generation ago now have either been outsourced, automated, or are on the verge of being eliminated altogether due to AI.

On the other hand, trades that were looked down on among my middle-class set, like auto repair or plumbing, suddenly seem like much better bets than, say, copywriting, which can now be largely be performed by an algorithm.

This is us.

The entire global economy feels like it’s in some sort of liminal space between the last gasps of the Industrial Revolution which still informs our educational system and our manufacturing base, the Information Age, and the ongoing Digital Revolution with its Frankensteinian offspring, artificial intelligence.

At some point (perhaps soon), we will reach the Age of Artificial General Intelligence, the point at which computers meet or surpass human capabilities across a general swath of activity, a moment which the futurist Ray Kurzweil calls, “The Singularity.” Some have said AGI will be humanity’s last invention because, afterwards, the machines will be better at problem-solving, creative thinking, and innovation than ourselves.  It is the machines that will move humanity forward, not humanity.

All of this is well-known, of course, and I don’t mean to have any special insight – or even more than the most basic understanding – of any of it. What I do know is that humanity is living on the spear tip of a Y axis that has gone vertical. The rate of acceleration across all human endeavors has sped up to the point of incomprehensibility. Again, all well-known. But what does it mean for people like my kids and the generations to come?

How does one create a purposeful professional life when the definition of a “professional life” seems to change every six months or so? Oddly, my own decision to become an actor – viewed as little better than deciding to become a kamikaze pilot – has now proven to be a prescient choice because an actor’s life is one of constant reinvention, exploration, and instability. It forces one to become comfortable with discomfort and to seek out other avenues to generate work, which is how I became a writer, podcaster, stand-up comedian, and whatever else it is I do. A creative life requires the kind of flexibility that struck my parents as foolhardiness.

“You will be poor,” they told me and I took them at their word.

Now, though, the same set of skills those in the arts have had to rely on for generations have become crucial for a much broader percentage of the population. People enter an industry for a few years, depart for another, re-educate themselves, get side gigs which sometimes turn into primary gigs, or burn out on the entire maddening thing and retreat from the professional world altogether.

A new industriousness is being forced upon us, not because we crave the hard work of hustling, but because it’s the only way to survive. I watched a video yesterday of an Uber driver whose passenger got arrested. The driver filmed the encounter and when the policeman (illegally) told him to stop recording, the driver responded, “I know my rights. I’m a lawyer.”

“A lawyer who’s also an Uber driver?” the cop scoffed before the driver handed him his bar card proving his bona fides.

I didn’t even bat my eyes. Yeah, even lawyers are getting side hustles. A friend of mine who had been a TV producer for decades now also drives for Uber, which he picked up after getting fired from his job selling propane. I have another friend who went to school for social work, found it impossible to make a living, became an interior designer, found it impossible to make a living, and has now returned to social work. My uncle used to sell ad space for trade magazines. His entire industry disappeared; for a while, he was driving authors around on book tours until the publishing industry decided to stop sending authors out on book tours to save money.

There’s an arts college here in Savannah called The Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD). Their most popular major is animation. The former Disney CEO, Jeffrey Katzenberg, said about half a year ago that AI will eliminate 90% of all animation jobs. Other jobs set to disappear (or at least become greatly reduced) in the next decade or so: truck driver, postal sorter, translator, travel agent, tax preparer, data entry, many entry-level retail positions and factory jobs, and probably about a million others. All of this while housing prices continue to remain out of reach for most adults, marriage and birth rates continue to plummet, and tax rates ensure that social services will remain underfunded. Making a purposeful adulthood for oneself is a fundamental property of a happy life; how do we ensure that opportunities for future generations don’t get subsumed by greed and technology? Even Katzenberg has reinvented himself. His new firm has exited media and is looking for opportunities in the fields of cybersecurity, consumer technology, and yes, the future of work. It’s always been hard out here for a pimp, but we’re all pimps now.