NEW YORK, NY – NOVEMBER 30: Jon Stewart, James Poniewozik and Chris Smith attend TimesTalks at … [+] TheTimesCenter on November 30, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Steve Zak Photography/FilmMagic)
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Songwriter extraordinaire Burt Bacharach died in 2023 at the age of 94. In a recent New York Times interview of Herb Alpert, the musician extraordinaire looked back to 2021 when Bacharach called. He was going into the hospital to have fluid drained from his lungs, but in between shots and draining his plan was to study some musical arrangements sent to him by a younger musician.
Bacharach worked until he died, but the work didn’t kill him. It arguably animated his every breath. He was doing what he couldn’t not do.
Sticking with the New York Times, its chief television critic (James Poniewozik) was recently interviewed by Times reporter Sarah Bahr. Bahr quipped that he “has a tough job: he gets paid to watch TV.” Which is the point of this opinion piece. Retirement is soon to become a dated notion, and much quicker than most realize. Poniewozik’s work shows why.
He’s literally paid to watch TV and write about the TV about which he’s passionate. It’s a story of progress, but much more important, the production that enables progress.
Poniewozik tells Bahr there are days when he’ll “spend all day doing nothing” but watching television. Some days he’ll watch very little television, but only because he’s spending time writing columns informed by all the watching.
Without shrinking the value of his work for even a second, it’s worth pointing out that none of what Poniewozik does has anything to do with producing life’s necessities. Which is a very bullish truth.
Precisely because life’s necessities are more and more within the grasp of growing numbers of people, and precisely because those same necessities require fewer and fewer work hours to attain, it’s increasingly true that more and more of us want to be entertained when we’re not working. Enter Poniewozik.
No doubt he’s working hard, but his work is of the post-production kind. With abundance growing by the day at prices that continue to drop (leave aside the higher prices that emerged in recent years as a consequence of panicky politicians wrecking supply chains constructed over many decades), the beautiful result is more and more people are able to exit production in favor of doing full-time what they used to do in their free time.
Some will observe that Poniewozik isn’t the first of his kind, but that in no way shrinks the obvious implications of what’s ahead. And what’s ahead is not just machines that mass produce for us, but machines that will think for us.
It signals surges in production that will make the present appear rather impoverished by comparison. What this means for a growing number of us regardless of background or educational attainment, is that the work of tomorrow will more and more reflect our unique skills, interest and intelligence, and not reflect the necessity of production itself.
With machines taking care of so much of the production part, people won’t be put out of work as much as they’ll be propelled into work that will have characteristics similar to Poniewozik’s. More and more of us will have “tough jobs” that reflect our individual passions, and that brighten the days and nights of an increasingly acquisitive global workforce.
What it signals about retirement is that it will soon enough vanish as an endpoint for workers. “Tough jobs” of the kind Bahr describes are anything but, and they’re jobs that we will not stop doing, even when we’re visiting the hospital to stave off death.
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Publish date : 2024-09-21 03:00:00
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