My father had one job, I've had six, my kids will have six at the same time

Post by sniddy » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 2:59 AM UTC

m_fayer wrote: post #40

pjc50 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Job' is the input side to which "rent/mortgage" are outputs. 'Job' is about continuity and stability; the ability to make commitments to regular expenditures required to maintain a particular standard of living. Highly variable income is bad for this. That's one of the reasons why people push back so hard on the "gig economy"; it brings the fear that you might not be able to make rent/mortgage next month and therefo…

I usually work as a consultant and my income is highly variable. Of course in our field when I earn it's nothing to complain about, and my average for most years is certainly nothing to complain about. Financially, I'm lucky. And yet. I'm disciplined with money. I'm not impulsive or indulgent. I can build a mean spreadsheet. Put all this together and still the uncertainty and variability is stressful. Running down a…

agreed, though one thing about the gig economy is income is not feast or famine, just lower overall.

Post by PhilWright » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 4:13 AM UTC

The statement “My father had one job in his lifetime, I will have six jobs in my lifetime, and my children will have six jobs at the same time.” makes a pithy statement but is generally not true.

My father had about 6 jobs in his working life. Looking at my uncles they varied in the number of jobs but none of them had just one, over a working life of more than 40 years each. Thinking wider still, I cannot think of a single person in my parents generation that had just one job.

It might be that people average more jobs today than they did in the past. Maybe you can project that forward and guess that a future generation will average more. But to say 6 concurrently is wild speculation and hard for me to take seriously.

There is no reason to think our children will have many concurrent jobs. Certainly no more than people do today.

Re: My father had one job, I've had six, my kids will have six at the same time

Re: My father had one job, I've had six, my kids will have six at the same time