Published on 12, July, 2020
Your job/purpose hasn't been invented yet, I mean what woiuld someone like Bill Gates have done if computers hadn't been in their early mass market stages when he was a teenager? Is it possible that for some of us our "thing" is waiting to be invented?
It's certainly posible but in that case your ideal job is probably 'scientist' or 'enginear' since you will probably have to invent / make what ever your job is eventually based around. There are a few times where someone else comes along and re purposes a new technology. Vtubers for example used motion capture technology that was really developed for movies / video games. But by and large you need to be in tech or able to splash out on cutting edge tech.
Projekt melody nearly bankrupted her self buying expencive tech at the start of her career. Code Miko wrote her own vTubing softwear.
The short answer is new jobs neiches really only happen when technology advances or there is some major social legal shift. If your dream job doesn't exist yet then it's probably because:
It's also quite posible your dream job does exist it's just so obscure you didn't know it existed.
Interesting answers Peter, I think it quite possible that people's thing could be obscure or out of date, I mean what if you were a brilliant flint knapper? How would you know you had such a feel for the stone? Who would want knapped flints in this day and age. I'm afraid I didn't understand what you were talking about in your first paragraph.
Desmond, I used Bill Gates as an example of someone who's time had come, how he did it I don't know, but he did.
Mellowjian, Yes it is more likely that most of us will end up in dead end jobs that don't fulfil us on any level, but this was more of an imaginative question and exercise than a real world problem solving one.
Well the issue here is the difrence bettween a job and a hobby. Flint knapping is mostly a hobby nowerdays. The people who actually get paid to do it are mostly getting paid to do it and then write about it (researchers) or do it while others watch (historical reinactors). A few people who do arts and crafts might do flint knapping as part of making larger peices. But flint knapping on it's own isn't really a job anymore. Technology can destroy jobs as well as create them (https://youtu.be/nyu4u3VZYaQ)
You do get obscure jobs though. Like sword smithing. There are people who hand make swords and armore even to this day. It's just very obscure and hard to get into. But I think people know the job exists.
I'm talking about the jobs that don't exist yet. Like before the first train being a train driver wasn't a job. Before the teliphone there were no teliphone sanitisers. If your dream job doesn't exist yet, it's not obscure it actually doesn't exist, but it will one day, the odds are the reasion is technology hasn't developed yet. If it's 1800AD and you want to be a train driver your options are 1. invent and build your own train or 2. wait for the train to be invented in 1804.
But there are cases where a machine was invented for 1 job and then others (usually soon after) realise it can be used for a difrent job. The first quad coptior drones were built as toys. Then some one realised you can atach a bomb to one and now in ukrain there are plenty of jobs operating quadcopter drones as remote bombaders. Some one realised the technology could be repurposed.