Times Are A Changing

            Spontaneous blog alert! This morning, as I sipped on coffee and perused Facebook and YouTube, I came across a new string of rants and videos about yet another new YouTube policy that folks do not like. As I listened to Boogie2988 discuss the problems with a new copyright policy, a thought occurred to me.

            The landscape of jobs in America has changed greatly. As a people, most of us no longer worry about growing our own food. We don’t have gardens, we don’t have pastures of cows or coops of chickens. So what do we do to earn our living? Manufacturing is no longer as prominent as it once was. Technology has slowly thinned those jobs out anyway. From what I’ve seen, the application process for office jobs is highly competitive. Everyone wants to work in a comfortable room with a desk and chair, complete with a lunch hour to take at an actual restaurant. When those jobs are taken, where does that leave the rest of us?

            I’ve mentioned in a previous post about how companies like Google (which owns YouTube) and Amazon have created jobs and opportunities that did not exist fifteen years ago. In a day where jobs are scarce and hard to come by and it seems like everyone either has or is getting a college degree of some sort, what are we to do with ourselves when the work force doesn’t seem to want us? It doesn’t matter how we do it (so long as it’s legal), we just have to come up with the money to get by and pay for housing and food. So why not turn to the Internet?

            Creativity is perhaps, now more than ever, a very valuable trait to have. If we can’t do the day jobs that our parents and grandparents had, then we can create something of our own that will hopefully bring in enough revenue to provide us a comfortable lifestyle. It’s a risky venture, but times are changing and shifting so much that for some of us, we have nothing left to lose. And then the companies that we rely on to make our own way with our own creativity make these wonderful new policies that once again threaten to tear down everything we have tried to build.

            It’s such a tricky world. Can I go back to building my fort out of sheets and pillows and sipping chocolate milk while I watch Cartoon Network?