Is your job comfortable or sustainable?

I was in a hurry for the office, when I came out of the house I saw uber and lyft stickers on my neighbor’s car.
I had seen him driving a taxi two days ago.
I remember him telling me that he was driving a taxi for the last 13 years.
We had a conversation in our jogging a month ago about life, job, and family.
He is a sole breadwinner for his family.
In our conversation, he’d told me that he has not paid the rent for the last 2 months yet, he doesn’t have regular income, no savings, no 401(K), nor an IRA account.
“My friend, I am a PhD and I don’t have all of these you mentioned. Life happens in hustles, not in plans.” I shared.
I am very familiar with his three kids who are all under age 10.
Sometimes his kids and my kids play together.
He came to see me on Saturday evening and told me that he sold his taxi and loaned the new car to use as an uber drive.
He teared up, looked down and said something, I couldn’t imagine expressing myself here.
“If my mom would have grabbed one extra glass of wine when I was in her womb, I would be better off.” he said.
I consoled him by saying you are not alone. American culture is strange, as a nation we have 23 trillion dollars national debt and 14 trillion dollars consumer debt. At least one in four people who make 100,000 plus a year still report living paycheck to paycheck. We are in a society where we carry i-phone insurance but we don’t buy insurance for our kids. He listened to me but still I could feel his pain in his appearance.

I added, “You can drive an uber for a few years from now but 10 to 20 years from now, you may not drive it because all cars will be driverless.”
“You can not unlearn what you already know but you can transform it into something else.” I emphasized.
We don’t need to create new jobs but we have to invent a new tweak in the same old job.
After we know the basics of our daily job, it’s easier to live in a bubble than reality. What’s important and harder is how to navigate the repetitive daily job with the people, technology, and most importantly, the unknowns around us.

Everything changes with time and change comes a lot faster in today’s fast pace technology.
We must change and adapt with the changing circumstances, therefore, sometimes we might have to be a little bit ahead of time by learning a few new tools and skills.
There are many tough decisions we have to make in life. Deciding to change the way we work in our comfort zone is the most difficult part. It certainly involves making difficult choices and making a habit of saying ‘no’ to many unimportant things in life.

Through my elementary to middle school, my family used to have only a portable national panasonic battery radio in the house as a technological equipment. My mother used to cook breakfast for me everyday for sixteen years until I finished high school listening to that radio. Nowadays, she receives calls from me and other family members and says, it’s not difficult to use a smartphone, push ‘f’ icon to scroll facebook, push a green phone icon to accept a call and a red icon to end the call. My mom didn’t get a chance to study after 6th grade. I am bringing this up here because she was scared of the smartphone in the beginning but now smartphone has become her new best friend, a very comfortable piece of device. She hesitated in the beginning because she thought it was hard and difficult to use, but she was forced to adapt to it because many of our family members are out of home. She needed it to talk to us in time of need. She learned and adapted with it. I love you mom, you are awesome.

Comfort is the result of repetitions. My neighbor was very comfortable as a taxi driver, he didn’t pay attention outside of his comfort zone so he didn’t see that he is losing his job very soon.

Remember that sustainable life is lived outside of the comfort zone that brings growth and independence. Be as aggressive as you want with your repetitive mundane daily job, work harder than you ever thought with it. But the repetitive job may crush you very soon due to automation.

We all grew up with our family, especially parents telling us we were talented, special and unique, the truth is that most of us are almost the same, never try to go beyond the comfort zone. There is pleasure sitting in comfort. We don’t want to lose the pleasure because if we lose it, there is pain. And nobody likes pain.
We all start from different points in life but only those who grow gradually who step out of comfort to win the game of life.

After my conversation with my neighbor, I remembered the quote from late Stephen Hawking, a renowned physicist and cosmologist, “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.”
If we adapt we survive if we don’t we become extinct.

Uber and Lyft made all private cars accessible for an independent income source for hundreds of thousands of people but the same became hurricane for taxi drivers.
Taxis became things of the past now.

Automation will eliminate more and more jobs in the near future.
Its impact is already in manual labor jobs but it will not be limited there. Many skilled and cognitive labor jobs will also be disrupted immensely, probably permanently.
I recall my uncle’s best friend, who was an investment officer in a bank.
I also remember his quirky face when he was talking about Robo-advisers with my uncle.
He retired early from bank and now is a freelancer as a personal finance expert and teaches finance in undergraduate college.
Robo-advisers are coming after expensive investment advisers and their high paying jobs.

In the age of automation, many jobs will be lost especially to AI.
If we are seriously thinking about this issue as Yuval Noah Harari, a historian, predicted that, “Industrial revolution manifested a working class, the AI revolution will manifest a useless class.”
Automation could invite mass unemployment and destitution if we are unprepared for it.
Looming automation and declining employment will spark financial insecurity for the disadvantaged.
Majority of our institutions, current bureaucratic systems, and government mechanisms are not prepared to manage technology-centric upheaval.
For example, we have 16 million Americans as retail workers, 11 millions construction workers, and 4 million truck drivers, who will be affected directly by automation in the first stage. This is only a very small snapshot of a bigger picture.

When we do repetitive tasks continuously, smart technocrats and entrepreneurs always question: is it possible to continue repetitive work in our absence? This is how automation enters in our life to free our time.
If automation and robots do the mundane tasks, we as humans will have more time to imagine, explore, and discover. But this is possible only if we are eager to break the barrier of comfort that we have been living for years.
We shouldn’t only go through the comfort job but grow through it. This is the only way not to be outsourced by robots and technology.
Automation is an achievement of curious minds to make human life easy and luxurious.
Comfort is always broken by curiosity.

We have advanced a lot in neuroscience, we exceled it in its understanding but still we don’t know the full picture of how the brain produces curiosity.
Our body is made up of mainly carbon and hydrogen and the brain also has the same composition but its uniqueness is unknown.
Imagine the power of a curious mind.
Albert Einstein discovered the theory of relativity because of his curious mind.
Think of this curiosity generated machine which is about 2.5 petabytes of memory as one petabyte is roughly 13.3 years of HDTV video.
The more we explore curiosity, the more we discover automated-technology.
Curiosity has human connection therefore, one curious mind links to another curious mind.
For example, Nikola Tesla invented the AC motor, but Thomas Edison refined it for our use and we are utilizing it for automation now. Language processor ELIZA was conceptualized by Joseph Weizenbaum but Siri and Alexa are about to revolutionize us in the age of automation and AI.
The more curious we become, the more chances of advanced technology to reshape our lives.

Mark Twain said, “There are only two important days in life, the day we were born and the day we discover the purpose of our life.”
After finding the purpose, the curious minds go all in to achieve their goals. They make their failure a curiosity towards success. They give us incredible technologies which we consume regularly.

We all have two persons inside us, one is real that represents us and the other is across us who is controlled by others.
The other might be our family, friends, or society as a whole.
Out of these two persons, who do you listen most determines everything in your life including your everyday job.
We must listen inside us, our gut, and our intuition that tell us what needs to be acquired or changed in a everyday job.
Always move with your gut and intuition, break your comfort zone, instill curiosity and live a happier life.
I asked my neighbor friend, “If you were going to build a career from scratch using the available resources, how would you do it?’’
He replied, “I would spend time studying human interest and curiosity.”

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina