Life in the Labyrinth

My current day job is a strange one that I fell into via an obsessive childhood interest in people-watching and psychology. Despite gaining a totally-unrelated degree and years of experience in a field which was once deemed cutting edge, all those dizzyingly high-tech edges have blunted long ago like many other skills that took years to acquire.

How so? My first chosen role - like so many others who studied for a career path before the start of the new millennium - was nixed as a casualty of ubiquitous technology. Almost overnight,  my dream job became an anachronism. 

Even decades before AI arrived, that newest nihilistic kid on the block threatening redundancies to the masses, my initial career trajectory was toast when smartphone apps enabled individuals and businesses to do complex things we'd been trained to do the long, hard way.

So, I did what so many Gen X-ers had to; I retrained and changed role. Despite a good few years being a renaissance woman, my second career also got washed away by "advances" in the world. If you call government austerity and economic downturn progress, that is. 

So, instead of having a "proper job" in this third age of my life, I've ended up listening to people's problems for a living instead.  

It's a strange set-up: I am essentially a zero-hours gig economy minnow in a sea of rich business-owner piranhas who drip feed us with work when it gets busy enough to share out. If its a quiet one, tough; you don't get paid that day. 

Guess what, I'm on bread and value-range jam today.