Many of us who've navigated through various job landscapes understand that the typical career trajectory doesn't fit everyone.
When you possess a wide array of talents and interests, sticking to traditional career paths often feels limiting. In the end, after a few years it becomes downright demotivating and dulling.
For individuals (like most bitcoiners) spending decades in the same department of a company seems outdated. The pace of change in the world makes it clear that adaptability is key. Real fiat slaves don’t have that skill. They adapt too slowly, or not at all.
The art of “job-hopping” (there’s a 1990s terminology for you) becomes necessary to keep pace with the evolving economy and tech. This way your value can seemingly diminish with each passing moment while your brain power and skills evolve more rapidly, outpacing your reward.
On top of this Fiat World view, there are two more factors to consider: the purchasing power drain (where your starting salary never really keeps up with your actual purchasing power and you don't get raises quickly enough to compensate) and the increased influence of bitcoinization of the job market, which will continue to grow in the coming years.
I want to discuss these two issues in the following piece because many companies are absolutely not aware, and hence unprepared for what's coming. They’ll be left with a basket of rotten apples, while other companies and organizations will be able to bake some fresh apple pies with the necessary joy of work and people who feel rewarded and motivated.
Fiat Career
A traditional career path is no longer relevant in a world where adopting the bitcoin standard will become the norm. Both in time and momentum, you can see that a fiat salary (in euros and various smaller benefits) no longer suffices.
A simple calculation of the salary you start with and the average adjustment for inflation shows us that you can work for a maximum of 1.5 years in the same company at the same eurocoin salary before you start feeling the full cycle of price increases negatively impacting you (public transportation, subscriptions, software, childcare, food, rent, utilities, insurance...).
Whether these adjustments are made monthly or at another interval, after a year and a half, you can say that you're effectively feeling the full range of price increases. Wages rise with a delay of 3 to 12 months along with the index adjustment, although it's always too late and too little to compensate for the adjustment.
Or, to put it in Lyn Alden's words (from a presentation at Bitcoin Atlantis 2024) : "When you realize after a year that the state has printed 5% more money, you can't go to your boss and ask for a 5% raise because your salary was still calculated based on the old M2 money supply."
However, you can't wait indefinitely for a normal (rewarding) salary and expect it to adjust every few months at least.
It's not even culturally recognized as a problem in an inflationary fiat world.
Working is more than ever about "job hopping" or rather "dodging inflation," just like investing... so you'll have to take more and more risks each time, or work further from home or in more difficult conditions (stress, danger, or knowledge-wise...) to stay "ahead" of that fiat decline.
Like a cartoon character running away, down a mountain slope, pursued by a snowball, you eventually have no escape. You spectacularly crash while being part of an ever-growing snowball rolling down into the abyss along with you.
Many give up and seek other ways to get by: spending less, living simply but some become depressed, sick, or move to a faraway land to escape the snowball. (usually, a similar scenario repeats itself there; unless you can fill a significant skills gap or have enough capital to deploy).
The increasing rollout and influence of Bitcoin as hard money will play a soothing role here as well. Many don't need to escape to distant lands or live as ascetics to get by.
They have made the switch to the most superior and hard money: bitcoin.
These people experience or have experienced, an important turning point where they transitioned from fiat slaves to real people and individuals with their own goals, motivations, and content. These people have learned to walk upright again and can inhabit the oasis after years of crawling through the scorching sun of this job market.
The “B-point”
This is the B-point. A point in time, on a personal level, when you "get it." It can be a coincidence of circumstances, but also an event, a piece of knowledge, or a certain insight that suddenly changes someone from a fiat slave to a bitcoiner.
I call this the B-point, a G-spot for monetary awakening.
This point lies elsewhere for everyone, of course. It can happen when you attend a bitcoin presentation, it can happen when you experience a very strong emotion after being confronted with the power (and abuse of it) of a banking or state system. It can just as easily happen when you look at the receipt from your local supermarket and realize that inflation is always catching up with you.
The time before this B-point (which is different for every individual) is the past. A past where you watched mainstream channels and their rubbish. A past where you obediently handed over your money to the bank to be managed by people who couldn't manage anything or were proudly reporting a 4% loss per year. A past where you believed in installments, expensive loans, renovating houses, or building a small business in an environment where you were heavily taxed.
This B-point also leads to another insight: the fulfillment of your job comes under increasing moral, ideological, and monetary pressure. A modern job involves jumping from one company to another as often and quickly as possible to always negotiate a raise, higher pay, better conditions, or extras to "keep up." At the same time, you are under increasing pressure to balance costs and your own knowledge acquisition.
Fiat jobs, for the layman, are jobs that operate in the Euro / fiat world. They are paid in Eurocoins by traditional firms that provide services and goods in and for the euro world. These are usually legacy companies that operate in a world where the biggest fish continues to eat the smaller ones and where quality is under pressure in all areas. The fiat world usually rewards mediocrity, lack of quality, cookie-cutter solutions, and management bloat. These elements are present everywhere in such companies. While innovation, being agile, and truly thinking outside the box are necessary. Regardless of the hollow terms and buzzwords used indiscriminately by dull types who have never had an original idea but boast about being the great example.
In my opinion, there is a massive shift happening from fiat to bitcoin. I’ve seen it in 4 companies already: coders quitting, sales people going “crypto” and in the end becoming bitcoiners, but also the silent people who contributed a lot and one day just left to go to Portugal.
This example is created by people who have the capacity to think strategically, technically or are involved in marketing, communication and knowledge in general.
It's no wonder, then, that there is a brain drain happening.
What person with abilities, talent, and insight wants to remain stuck in the mud of the fiat job world?
Who wants to keep working for centralized outdated systems for a salary in a paper promise-coin from a union or state?
Who wants to be paid in "money" that isn't money anymore but an injected monetary suppository?
What kind of people with backbone, brainpower, and talent still want to work for a system that's stuck somewhere between 1840 and 2008?
Since the financial banking crisis of 2009-10, something has really changed: your old legacy system is failing. And nobody dares to explain it to the masses of Homo Televisionicus people who obediently stare at their streaming services, believe in explanatory magazines, and worry about who's winning various games. Such people also quickly get annoyed by the HEFE conversations, the useless daily tasks, and the other idiosyncrasies of daily office heroes. The alpha males and alpha females in an office may try to control things with management techniques from books (read: “measure the measurements”), but they won’t succeed in removing the dulling, mind numbing effects of the fiat world itself. The annoying environments, the effects of "sick-building syndrome" in those offices and the general boredom or fake work and bullshit jobs have become nothing more than a pacifier. Where’ an employee is only as good as their last review cycle.
In general, a bitcoin job offers higher quality of life, better organization, higher rewards in real hard money on the horizon, and will also reward innovation, talent, and work instead of being a lowest common denominator among a lot of people.
Traditional brain drain usually happens between regions and countries. A country that traditionally provided well-educated people saw many of their engineers, doctors, specialists, good craftsmen... leave for other places where they could earn more or work in a less oppressive regime. This was mainly of geographical origin. Like India, where many highly educated people saw leaving for Great Britain and Canada.
Why should you care about this theory?
Because it's just a hypothesis, of course. I assume that bitcoinization of the world will happen faster, I also assume that the Cantillon effects in the fiat world will take on even more extreme forms, and I even assume that the systems that will adapt will likely move towards command economies or at least a delayed form of Keynesian economics.
You can ignore that, you can think "it'll be fine for me," and continue to your meaningless 9-to-5 job, attend remote meetings, and drink weak coffee. Meanwhile, your repayments, debt burden, and buying unnecessary junk continue. Meanwhile, you are further drained by a system that doesn't appreciate quality, long-term thinking, or innovation. In other words, you're feeding the prison you're building around yourself. You even provide the bars, the poor nutrition, and the designs yourself. Because you're simultaneously the slow construction of a poisoned and poisoning system where even well-meaning organizations are captured by the common good.
You are the past, the further, the passive bystander, and victim of a machine that will never stop unless people stand up and put a stick in the works. You're either someone who will stop turning because we put a stick in your machinery (and then watch lost, incomprehensibly), or you're part of the future and join the new Bitcoin standard. Unlike daily stand-up meetings or endless series of management emails, that requires more "being human." Companies that aren't on board with this will first slowly, then quickly, see their top people, their brains, flow away to bitcoin havens. Such a system truly rewards work, courage, innovation, backbone, and... strong coffee.
So, the bad news for all the traditional companies’ and their fancy “measure the measurements” ideology.
Conclusion:
The three items punching the traditional job market where it hurts are as follows : Information, lifebuoy and fomo.
1 - More information about bitcoin is available, ranging from highly technical and philosophical to easily understandable basic explanations. This appeals to an increasingly diverse audience, who can be active in all kinds of jobs and can reach the B-point.
2 - The effects and benefits of using bitcoin as a lifebuoy are no longer limited to savings or investment, but now also as real compensation in hard money. People prefer to be paid in bitcoin, bitcoin-related jobs are ideal for that, compared to the guaranteed loss of buying power in the euro/dollar-based labor market?
3 - The network and FOMO effect are also becoming visible. A company or department where one or more employees have already moved on to better themselves in bitcoin jobs, results in visibility and recognition. People notice that and will sooner or later follow suit if they inform themselves.
So, whoever is left behind is passively part of the problem.
Whoever stays behind has a payment plan for their own downfall.
Whoever moves forward has hope, motivation and true wealth in all its forms on the horizon.
@deadeyes (Manuel) writing for AllesVoorBitcoin.be
if you like this article or want to steal from it, please give credit.
tips: donate@allesvoorbitcoin.be (LN)
(This is a small part of a chapter on life/work balance, from my upcoming book)