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My first job wasn’t the one I usually tell people about.
When I’m asked, I often say I started my first business at sixteen — doing manual drafting for architects and engineers. That’s true. But it leaves out what came before — the part I didn’t talk about for years.
Long before I was drawing blueprints, I was scrubbing floors.
My family had immigrated from the Azores, and like many immigrant families, we took the work that didn’t require English or education — cleaning. From the age of twelve, my younger sisters and I helped my parents clean doctors’ offices, car dealerships, banks, and dentists' offices in Silicon Valley. We were their extra hands, allowing them to take on as many jobs as possible. Each one paid very little.
We cleaned floors, toilets, and emptied wastebaskets.
That was a job. It helped us survive.
I wanted more, of course. I wanted to be an architect.
But that was something on the side — a dream I focused on every spare moment.
There’s a stigma to that kind of work — and even more so to having your children do it with you. But that was our reality. My parents feared the day they might not find work. Or lose a job. Which happened regularly.
From an early age, I understood something. A job isn’t just work. It’s your right to belong.
A job is never just a way to earn money. It’s a bargain — and a boundary.
A structure of survival, and a system of force.
You give your time — your life energy, in exchange for permission to participate. The paycheck is only part of it. The deeper currency is belonging. The deeper cost is obedience.
Politicians know this.
They talk about “creating jobs” as if they were conjuring life itself. “Good-paying jobs” become campaign slogans. Opponents are accused of “destroying jobs” — as if they were dismantling society itself.
Corporations know it too.
They use jobs as both carrot and stick — the offer of security to attract, the threat of removal to control. “We’re bringing 1,000 jobs to your community” often means tax breaks for them — and dependency for everyone else.
But a job is not just a symbol. It’s a mechanism of discipline.
It shapes when you wake, how long you sit, what you wear, what you say, and who you answer to. The threat of job loss keeps entire populations in line — quiet, compliant, afraid to speak.
In the United States, the threat cuts even deeper. Here, a job doesn’t just mean income. It often means access to health care.
Unlike most countries, where health is a right, the U.S. system ties health insurance to employment — a practice that began during World War II, when wage caps led companies to offer benefits instead of raises. What started as a workaround became a trap.
Lose your job, and you risk losing care itself.
People stay in toxic workplaces. They stay silent about mistreatment. They suppress what matters — just to keep coverage.
And when the story shifts, they are let go — not because they stopped contributing, but because their role is no longer required.
That’s the thing about jobs: They’re not just about work. They are how control is quietly enforced.
We don’t just lose employment.
We lose security. Identity. Care. Voice.
Now, with artificial intelligence advancing, we’re warned again: “Your job is at risk.”
And the proposed fix? A government check. Universal Basic Income. A wage for existing in a system that may no longer need your labor — but still reserves the right to define your worth.
Still, the story remains the same:
Life must be made compliant before it can be counted.
When I started drafting, I thought I’d escaped that world.
No mops. No chemical fumes. A step closer to the life I imagined.
Later, when my Computer-Aided Drafting consulting business began to wane with the downturn in the Canadian real estate market, I co-founded an Internet startup. We struggled to survive. But we weren’t just working — we were innovating, building, shaping something new.
Then we were acquired.
I became general manager. Later, vice president.
Title. Salary. Stock, Benefits. All the signals of success.
For the first time, I felt the full machinery of the job system from the other side.
Everything revolved around numbers — headcount, budgets, targets. People became line items. Their worth measured by performance reviews and quarterly goals.
I remember laying off hardworking, committed people — not because they had failed, but because the spreadsheet demanded it.
People told me it was just business. But to me, it felt deeply personal.
That was the moment I saw it clearly:
The job had stopped being about contribution.
It had become about control.
Jobs aren’t evil. They’re just stories, ways we’ve organized contribution and exchange. But like any story, they can harden into dogma. They can drift from the living realities they were meant to serve.
Through the Story Lens, jobs feel natural — even moral.
They organize effort. Measure worth.
They divide the employed from the unemployed.
They offer structure, identity, legitimacy.
Through the Life Lens, jobs are not reality. They are containers.
Sometimes useful. Always symbolic.
Life doesn’t need a job to be valuable.
A forest filters air. A child creates. A neighbor helps.
Contribution doesn’t need permission.
Life doesn’t clock in.
It flows.
I sometimes think about those fluorescent-lit nights — the sound of vacuums, the hush of empty buildings, the quiet dignity in what we gave. We weren’t employees. We were contributors. We didn’t have titles. We had purpose.
We didn’t need a job to be worth something. But the world around us said otherwise.
That story — the one that equates labor with legitimacy — has lived long enough.
Because beneath every résumé, every contract, every job loss or gain, there is something deeper:
The pulse of life itself. Giving. Responding. Belonging.
That is the real economy — a living one.
And here’s the twist: for all their constraints, jobs have also left us with something powerful.
They trained us to coordinate. To specialize. To build together.
They gave us tools — system, models, language — for managing complexity and collaborating across differences.
What if those very tools could now serve something else?
What if we are not standing at the end of work, but at the beginning of something more alive?
A future not of employment, but of collaboration.
Not of fixed roles, but of shared purpose.
A world where contribution arises from need — not assignment.
Where coordination is not coerced, but chosen.
This isn’t an ideal. It’s a possible future.
One we may already have what we need to build.
Collabs — networks of people co-creating through shared protocols — are already emerging.
Not as replacements for jobs, but as the next chapter of human contribution.
Born from what came before. Directed toward what comes next.
Because every story unbound from life seeks to control it. And every story rooted in life learns to serve it.
That is the turn we are living through now — from compliance to connection, from labor to life, from jobs to shared impact.
And that is where this journey continues.