My grandpa’s entire family built battleships at the same factory. His brothers did it, his father did it…there are battleships literally carved into the headstones of these men.
I don’t do it, of course, because I know literally nothing about battle, and also ships, but more importantly that’s a robot’s job now.
So what’s a millennial entering today’s workforce to do, with all the honorable jobs these days going to robots and drones? Or, for that matter, what’s my grandpa to do now that we’ve moved him over here from Vladivostok, and the ship factory’s been privatized and sold off in pieces to various competing mafia factions?
Well, fret not millennials/grandpa! Here’s a quick intro to the technicolor myriad of new, modern jobs rising up to fill the void left by everything the robots stole from us! Why, with not a day wasted at college, you could become a…
Social Media Marketer
Equal parts I.T. Person that knows nothing about computers, and Marketing Person that knows nothing about marketing, you’re an essential part of every modern business, according largely to you.
Throwing around buzzwords like “demographic engagement” and “buzzword” you view your millennial compunction to snapchat everything you see as something you should put on your resume. Your real talent is somehow convincing older gentlemen in board rooms that you’re right about that.
Though no modern study shows the remotest correlation between social media presence and sales figures, you confidently assert a series of vague dogmas about it.
Essentially, you are a con artist whose biggest mark is yourself.
Ridesharing App Driver
Depending on your region, this occupation is on a sliding scale of legal dubiousness, which basically makes you a pot dealer who deals in widths instead of highs, and traffics not in grass, but in…traffic.
Taxi drivers despise you because you are literally doing their job, but without a shred of the insane financial investment and hoop jumping they had to do to get their cab. Taxi companies despise you because you are a walking/rolling demonstration of why all those hoops and fees were just a bunch of scams and B.S.
The joke is on both them and you, of course, because in a decade you will all have been literally replaced by an empty chair.
AirBNB Host
You supplement your living with what is ostensibly a countdown to your own murder. Growing up, you were taught never to talk to strangers, but there’s probably nothing wrong with briefly emailing with them before inviting them directly into your home, right?
Instagram Model
You were feverishly letting strangers objectify you long before a bottled water company asked you to work a bottle into each shot like you were some kind of duck-faced, backlit David Fincher, and you’ll be doing it long after they’ve moved on.
Lifestyle hasn’t intersected with occupation so effortlessly since fur trapping was the best way to support a family in North America, and it’s just as well because you don’t have the hand-eye co-ordination required for being a stripper, and the reality of your life is far too squalid for you to make it as an escort.
Etsy Shopkeeper
You require a complex middle man between your arts and crafts and the family members/friends you will inevitably guilt into buying them.
Martin Shkreli
You’re just a rancid fart of a person who was recently banned from twitter for being a shit.
Stock Photographer
There’s a certain je ne sais quoi about stock photography that positions it unmistakably as artless. You could take two identical photographs of a flower petal, and if one of them is intended to be used as stock photography, everyone who sees it will tell you that this particular flower petal is fucking bullshit.
That being said, as a successful stock photographer you go above and beyond to combine subject, setting, light and lens in a manner that will not just irritate but fully anger people.
Enigmatic lady in a power suit standing on a beach? Give her a salad! Tell her she’s baffled by it!
A happy pair of retirees at an ornately set slavic dinnertable with a samovar? Give them a laptop! Tell them they’re baffled by it!
Haunting, black and white still of a sunset over the gates of Auschwitz? Throw in a teenager with an iPhone and light-up sneakers! Tell him he’s baffled by it!
You are a master of your craft.
Search Engine Optimization Consultant
You are a social media consultant who doesn’t have the energy to use social media. Your primary daily objective is to insinuate yourself between a company, and the idea that the stuff they put on their website will be what turns up in the results of a search engine.
Literally the only variability that actually exists in that phenomenon, comes from updates to the search engine algorithms that are made daily specifically to discourage and invalidate your precise kind of bullshit.
Clickbait Architect
You write headlines that excessively overpromise and underdeliver, if they deliver anything at all.
You either call yourself a journalist, which is an insult to journalists, or a “content creator” which is surprisingly un-hyperbolic and maybe even admirable in its bland accuracy.
You know what? Good for you.
DJ In Giant Robotic Mask
Your sick beats are almost as loud as the blood you can hear rushing through your temples, and you spin as hard during your set as you do backstage attempting to restore your equilibrium.
Your popularity online is escalating as rapidly as the scoliosis and disk compression in your lower spine.
Friends tell you that maybe your mask didn’t need to be the size of a human torso, or at least didn’t need to be made from such weighty materials, but you know they’re just jealous. Jealous of your weird, giant mask, and your ability to combine other people’s songs into longer, shittier songs on the fly.
You’re dating a prostitute who keeps asking you to quit, because he/she makes enough money to support you both, and your career embarrasses him/her.
Pokemon Master
You have an unyielding commitment to catching ‘em all. But every year that number gets higher and higher. As Pokemon evolve, breed, and are reinvented and rebooted, the idea of ‘em all being catched becomes more and more ephemeral, like the delusional pipe dream of someone who isn’t even sure how this lifelong pursuit could ever be monetized.
Still, you’ve gotta be the very best.
President of the United States of America
Nobody really knows much about this job, other than the fact that it requires literally no qualifications, and the bar for entry was recently just kind-of taken off its supports and thrown into the rapidly rising ocean. Wooooooooo
The Chicken Feed 