Quote Originally Posted by thir View Post
But, and this is said without rancour though with some confusion in your case, I understand that myth is stronger than mere facts.
I'm not offended, but I do try not to use myths instead of facts. However, I am limited by my environment, and in all honesty by a certain amount of laziness. I have no idea what conditions are like elsewhere, even elsewhere in the US, except from reading scattered reports on line. I am only familiar with my own area of central South Carolina. I applied for several jobs over the last few years, jobs which required technical skills and a good education. At my age, even possessing those skills, the likelihood of getting such jobs is slim. And yes, there were dozens, if not hundreds, of applicants. But at the same time, you can walk into almost any McDonalds or Burger King or the like and be almost guaranteed a minimum wage job if you want it. Most don't even want to consider working in such places, though. In my case, while I was collecting unemployment, I would have had to get a job making more than double the minimum wage just to offset the amount of unemployment I was getting. There was no incentive for me to take such a job.

In my little corner of the world, though, there always seem to be SOME jobs advertised. My DIL works for a Jobs Company, similar to Monster, and they always have new clients coming in looking for qualified help. But the key word is "qualified". Our failed educational system doesn't exactly make people qualified.

What? But if people are self-employed, they do not need any other job - believe me! Sound like a very good solution to me, privately as well as nationally.
Yeah, but how many Mom & Pop groceries can one neighborhood support? How many lawn care "specialists"? There still has to be a customer base, even if you're self-employed.

What is wrong with being satisfied with what you have?
Nothing wrong with it. The only question is how you got there.

Automation alone makes the number of jobs go down ever so steadily - and number of people rises. We may end up with a society where jobs are just not an option through a person's entire life.
Automation makes for NEW kinds of jobs, jobs which require some skill and education. And perhaps the solution is to convince people that they should NOT have children. Like by NOT having the government reward them for adding more kids to the welfare rolls.

It is time for new thinking.
I haven't seen a whole lot of OLD thinking, sadly. ANY thinking, rather than just reacting, would be an improvement.

Are we here to work, and buy? Or to live, in our own right?
We aren't here to DO anything. That implies some kind of externally imposed purpose. We are HERE. That's all. What we MAKE of that is up to us. Very few of us are capable of surviving in the wilderness. And the wilderness is incapable of supporting too many anyway. So we must work to live, if at all possible. One benefit of being human is that we do, for the most part, try to take care of those who are not able to work, for various reasons. Where we need to draw the line is in supporting, indefinitely, those who don't WANT to work.