Any successful standup comic. To gain a practical understanding of the downside and the struggle.
I wouldn’t care to be a billionaire because it would be just my luck that it’d be the day people wised up and the revolt began, and I could say the same thing with respect to world leaders.
I’m afraid I’d be damn near unemployable in the world of dreams. If I’m not running from something or falling down, my teeth are falling out. (I certainly couldn’t get anyone to provide decent dental coverage in dream world, and I’d be suspected of Meth addiction.) Unlike the real world, in which I’m hyper-punctual, in dreams I’m always late and I often go out of doors to find myself on the other side of the world. Besides, in dreams I’m usually not lucid more than once a month, at best.
I had a restaurant idea I was going to call “Git It Yo Own Damned Self.” It would extend the Korean Hot Pot / BBQ concept in which one has to do one’s own cooking to include getting your own food from the kitchen and then bussing your own table and washing your own dishes. I realize one couldn’t charge as much, but in the US I think you could still collect 20 – 25% gratuities for the imaginary waitstaff to offset the lesser meal cost.The best thing would be responding to bad reviews with: “Don’t look at me, they did it their own damned selves!”
Hard work makes me feel full of aches and filled with pain. So full. So filled.
Hah. That ship has sailed. But I could say that it’s to still have something to offer when machines / AI can do all productive tasks better and / or faster than humans — i.e. to be able to convey something of the art of being human. Even though, I suspect, I won’t be around to see that day, it will be catastrophic to the species if people don’t figure these things out in advance — i.e. if we don’t figure out human roles and purpose in a post-human industrial landscape.
“Maker of pies” leaps to mind, but then it occurs to me that any baker who worked at it for just a day would be the worst. It seems to me that any job that is interesting would be one that a person would be terrible at if that person did it for only a day. Conversely, any job one could successfully do for just one day would be tedious and unrewarding.
Kipling called prostitution
The world's oldest profession.
Now, I'm pretty sure that it
Will be the last, as well:
The last professional endeavor --
The last profitable activity --
That humans do better than
Machines.
Whores will be the last holdouts
To shift from being workers
To being Artists of Humanity. . .
Or - maybe - they will be
The first in that, as well.
To pick nits, I think the defining characteristic of a job is that one earns money for one’s time and effort. Otherwise, it’s volunteering or a hobby — both of which are fine activities in which I’ve participated over the years — but they’re not “jobs.” In the case of a hobby, one should do it because one loves it and / or gains from it. In the case of volunteering, if you’re doing the work only because you love the activity, you’ve probably missed the point of the undertaking.
I think that would have been “race car driver,” between my “cowboy” and “independently-wealthy-masked-vigilante” phases. (I did NOT know how jobs worked.)
Tiger Riding for Beginners 