🤔 Paying your dues

Curated and written by Jon Kallus

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Many people entering (and in) the workforce today are rethinking the age-old tradition of “paying your dues.”

This is causing friction with older workers, many of whom view their dues-paying era as a badge of honor.

Look around, tho. The dues-paying era is over!

We’re in the creator economy now, where successful software salespeople happily quit their jobs after going viral once, and talented creatives are quitting advertising because they can make more money on TikTok.

Zoom out: the fundamental aspects of modern life are changing.

We're all currently in a wild sociological experiment: the end of mainstream popular culture, as our information and entertainment sources splinter into ever narrower, more individualized streams. (Hold that thought.)

But there’s another, huge society-level change we're living through.

The end of objectivity.

To be fair, there were conspiracy theorists and “alternative fact” peddlers way before the Internet. They published physical newsletters, broadcasted on amateur or "ham" radio stations, or distributed their opinions via plain old word of mouth.

But. The ease with which anyone can post anything and have it algorithmically sent out to everyone today, makes that previous era seem quaint. (I mean, in early Facebook, posts had to be physically liked, or forwarded, or commented upon to go, quote-unquote, “viral.”)

Today, the algorithm decides whether what you're saying goes around the world.

This is making marketers' jobs much, much harder.

Zoom out again. Our recent era of shared, universally-agreed and accepted truths is really just blip in human history.

Copernicus suggested that the Earth revolves around the sun —and not the other way around— in the 16th century (Even though the concept had been bouncing around history and culture all the way back to ancient Greece.)

BUT. It took a hundred+ years after Copernicus spelled it all out, for his view of the sun to finally take hold.

If a hundred years sounds like a long time, well, Flat Earth took even longer to debunk: references to the Earth being round date also back to the ancient Greeks. (They were smart.) Despite that, the idea of a spherical planet Earth took about two millennia to become accepted fact.

For most of human history, our secular “truth” was simply what our village elder said around the campfire.

And that truth might be really, really different from the one shared by the elders in the next village over. That's actually the way info has been transmitted for much of history.

Today, we’re back to that: anyone, anywhere can share their truth —whatever it is— and probably find a welcoming audience for it.

One (of many) reasons creative or humourous marketing and advertising is so challenging these days, is because there are fewer and fewer references we all get, and things we all agree on.

At the same time, individual makers with a creative or humourous impulse have never had more paths to attention.

Funny.

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