Professional mourners are very much still a thing. Had them at a few funerals I attended.
Very awkward to see them more invested into crying for the departed than the family. Some of the family members also seemed to think so, but hey, it's tradition and respectful of the dead.
My dad worked on an assembly line making vacuum tubes. After that he was a calculator repairman for most of his life.
Calculator Repairman.
An entire life that is obsolete now. Because we no longer do much of the drudgery of assembly lines; we have machines that do it. Calculators (and other things) that used to require an entire infrastructure to keep running are now cheap and disposable.
Why can't a high school graduate raise a family of four and buy a house? Because this isn't that world. We've eliminated a lot of the jobs the middle class used to do.
It breaks immersion if the guy you hire as "weird hobo that dwells in your garden" to show off to your upper class friends is seen outside that context.
Yeah that was always one of the weirder sides of the Patriarchy, establishing naming conventions like the suffix -ess being female but still giving the title High Priestess of Athena Polias to a man.
Now, imagine being, let's say 50 years old, and losing your career. You previous job that you have been doing for 20 years is gone. And soon your home and possessions are too.
Do you have time to go back to school to learn a new skill and then start from the bottom again? And by the time you are done retraining, will anybody hire a 50 to 55 year old rookie when they can get a younger person for less money instead?
It's easy to say, "Just move and do something else" when you are 20. But the older you get it becomes very difficult to nearly impossible for a large number of people to do so. Not everyone can be retrained and there are few low skills jobs these days.
I bet a number of those jobs had transferrable skills. "Cigarette Girl" likely had sales and customer service skills. "Toad Doctor" may have either moved on to small amphibians, or something with crystals.
Some do, some don't. And not all people can be retrained for a new and different job. That takes time, money, and aptitude, which is something not everyone has.
There was a time when coal mines were being shut down - a good thing right?. And 1000's of miners were losing their jobs left and right and families were homeless and starving. Whole towns and cities were losing population as jobs were lost. The economic impact was felt up and down "Main Street".
There was a large cry that something must be done! An idea took hold that we should retrain all these coal miners for a new career. The Federal government even got involved with educational grants. The idea was to train people to code because well, the world needed a lot of coders, the pay was good, and the miners would have a better life - A win for all. And everyone in the rest of the world felt good about it and went back to their lives.
Turns out, coal miners don't really have a suitable and transferable skill set to learn coding. Nor is it very effective to teach a 50 year old how to code from scratch. And even if you were one of the lucky few to manage succeed at it, now AI threatens your livelihood.
The moral of the story is: Things change, the world changes. There are a lot fewer places large numbers of people can go to so they can start over. The skills barrier is a lot higher than it was when "cigarette girls" were a thing and that barrier just gets higher everyday. And frankly, not many cigarette girls were capable of learning the newest skills to get a different and hopefully better job. So now what do we do?
But the "smart" people are always willing to tell others what to do - it's their job you know.
And I wouldn't hold your breath about "safety nets" anytime soon. Resources aren't unlimited and greed to prevent that net is eternal.
And government tends to not do broad social policy well. They are stuck with "one size fits all" solutions out of necessity. And the more granular those polices get, the more byzantine the rules get. Plus by the time there is wide social approval to do something, the moment has passed and the world is now worse off.
Shuttering whole industries quickly, (a generation or less time frame), is how you create a huge population of "angry refugees" without homes or jobs as they try to move to other places to try and not starve. This seldom works out well for anyone.
The tried and true methods humanity has historically used to solve social upheaval are:
Starvation and death where you are at.
Moving to new lands that have few to no one else living there.
War to eliminate surplus populations.
Since no one wants to starve where they are and there are currently no new lands to settle, my money at this moment is on War. It will, unfortunately, solve a lot of current issues caused by excess populations - at least for a while.
“Cigarette Girl” likely had sales and customer service skills.
I don't know about that. They stood with trays of cigarettes in clubs. It's about as much of a customer service skill as people selling peanuts in the stands at a baseball game.
Hi, that's me now that everyone has access to a video editor. Even though most of them don't understand how to use it properly. They don't think they need people with actual editing skills anymore. I'm 46. The last job I had involved checking designs for quality control issues at a company where mostly businesses ordered a personalized product with their own art on it. It paid nothing. I'm kind of fucked, especially since I'll now have a gap in my resume because I had to leave to put my daughter through online school. If she stays in online school until she graduates, I'll be "out of work" for five years. At that point, no one is going to be a video editor anymore. I can't go back to school when I'm 51!
