History Repeating Itself
I had this crazy idea last year, that sparked while watching a random episode during my recent re-watch of the Downton Abbey series with my grandmother. Mosley was talking to Daisey about her aspirations that were beyond the expected norm for people in that social-class. Mosley says to Daisy in a very matter-of-fact tone: “Daisy, we’re servants.”
Now fast-forward to today where there is a “service industry” which includes jobs in hotels, restaurants, and cafes. Retail stores and professional drivers. The people working at the movie theater and at the fair. These are the jobs that nobody wants to have called their career, yet there are people working these jobs. Today we have gig jobs, where menial tasks like grocery shopping or buying bottled water at the gas station can be a task you have someone else do for money. You can hop online and find someone to come over to your house and do normal household things that, in the past, perhaps one of your parents might have taught you how to do. I have worked with kids who told me they had live-in nannies at their houses growing up. Live-in-nannies in the 21st century. I suppose this speaks to how out of touch I am, or perhaps how poor I am, but this is mind-blowing to me. Or perhaps the more honest truth is there were parents willing to share this information but the children were off in the other room glued to their screens. Or gaming.
With more and more places adopting, and more and more people embracing the idea of not only curbside pickup of their groceries, but enjoying the home delivery - I wonder how long it is before you can rent someone to come to your house and cook your dinner for you and your family. How long will it be before you can have someone come over and finally tackle that mountain of laundry piling up in the washroom because you have too much other stuff going on in your world? And by this same token, how long is it before people are adding on to their homes to let the staff have a place to stay? What really is the point of getting off work at 11PM or midnight if you have to be back at 5AM, anyhow? With the hasty rush to get AI robots into the workforce to perform all of our manual labor, people will definitely need somewhere to go for work. So it won’t be long, in my eyes, before the idea of the “service industry” gets a fundamental reset, and it starts to look a lot more like the “service” Mosley was talking about at the Abbey.
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DISCLAIMER: Ran this post thru spell-check with ProWritingAid to clean up my sloppy grammar. However, it tried to take almost my entire voice of the text out, so most of the suggestions were ignored. Additionally, the body of text was given to DALL-E 3 and instructed to make it's artistic representation of it in whatever fashion it wanted to.
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