What’s a job that was critical 100 years ago but doesn’t exist today?

I work for a newspaper, on the printing side. It's a miserable way to live. I commute two hours by public transportation. The entire way I ask myself: Am I going to get laid off today? Will the plant catch on fire? The answer is always a disappointing "no" but I guess you can't live without hope. I was ecstatic when Donald Trump put tariffs on newsprint. I am finally going to be free, I thought. But somehow we always survive. I found out recently that paper is so cheap that we've been hoarding it. We can run for years without a paper supplier.

I was unemployed for a long time and these people were willing to not only hire me, but promote me to successively higher-paying and lower-responsibility jobs. So now I feel indebted to them because I went from washing dishes at minimum wage to getting paid $15/hr to sit at a desk and make five spreadsheets and these five spreadsheets have become such a chore that I almost never do them because I'm too busy playing solitaire. Have you ever played solitaire for eight hours straight, three days in a row? It really make you think.

I'm supposed to contact advertising clients to see if they'd like to pay their bills today (most of them have been in arrears for MONTHS but we consider that a good thing for some reason. I guess potential money means something in the business world?) but the answer is always "no" so I gave up. I stay late sometimes to make it seem like I'm busy but I never am. Today my boss called me into the main office. I thought to myself: IT contacted management and let them know that I do nothing but play Tetris and read movie trivia all day while my quote-unquote work piles up on my desk. Surely I am going to be fired. You know what happened? My boss tearfully thanked me for all of the hard work I do and said that people like me are the reason this company is still running. They have hired me an assistant. And they doubled my annual vacation, which I almost never take, because why bother?

One day I will be the president of this company. There are people who pour their blood, sweat, and tears into the newspaper every single day and still make the same wage they did when they started. Constantly searching for new ways to improve our processes and breaking their backs to make sure people get their bird-cage liners every day. And they flounder at the bottom while I slowly bubble up to the top just because I like wearing ties.

I wrote the n-word in the bathroom in sharpie. I said that I wanted all of them to die. I don't know why. I like black people. Half of my family is black. The company hired a handwriting expert to find out who did it, and some guy with a shaved head who works the night shift lost his job. How is it possible to have faith in the world when these types of things happen?

I guess I went off on a bit of a tangent there, but my main point is this: your love of print is evil. You are an evil person if you support this industry. We get so wrapped up in our problems and our mass-produced artificial advertising-inspired lifestyles that it's easy to forget that the consumer products we love so much cost actual time and effort from living, breathing people who will not see a fraction of the money you spent on it. And it's not just print. McDonald's, Subscription Manboxes or whatever, craft beer. Cheap plastic shit from Amazon. I don't really buy stuff anymore so I'm kind of out of the loop on what's hip. The hour or so of pleasure you derive from spending your money took so, so much more from the souls of those who created your products. Please, let this business, and every other business, die before it kills us all.

/r/AskReddit Thread Parent