The latest paradigm in the current economy is you are now your own entity and brand. For better or worse, at will employment, the gig economy, and social media means what ever you think your job is forget it, because the only one that matters anymore is your role as the owner and CEO of You Inc. Your success, failure, and opportunities are completely tied to how you take on that job.
The post World War 2 economy in America was all about the union, the social contract, working together to build America, and a prosperous middle class. You found a job out of college, worked for 40 years, and then got a nice gold watch and pension on your way out the door. The company took care of you by offering insurance, stability, goals, a career path, and other perks and benefits. It wasn't uncommon to start in the mail room, stick with that company for 40 years, and then finish as an SVP.
I'm not going to get into which system is better or why it changed. That's a whole other article. But I wanted something to compare how drastically different things are today. That link between company and employee is rare now and diminishing by the year. The average time spent in a position for people in their 20's and 30's is less than three years. Companies are pushing more and more in-house roles to consultants and sub-contractors. Once standard benefits are not shrinking or non-existent. What this means is that now, you, the average worker, no longer can become a piece in a machine but you are a business selling your services to companies.
It's not really a fair system though. Your business is a small fish in a very big pond. A minnow perhaps. There is a lot of competition out there and if the stagnant wages in the US are any indication, the market strongly favors the demand side of labor. If you want to get ahead you need to constantly be adding skills so that you have more value. You need to become a marketing maven to sell yourself to companies and convince them why you deserve raises while you are there. There's no union contracts anymore to say what your job is worth, you need to figure out how to extract the highest value for your services on your own. All the while though, those corporations have experts, more and better information, and patience to get what they want. If they don't fill a position for a month it might hit their profit a bit or other employees will have to cover the work. If you are unemployed for too long your business fails. That makes you exploitable.
Not only that, but you are always on call. People get fired for comments on social media all the time. Jobs often require you to disclose your social media pages and have policies regarding what you can post once your are an employee. They can do a Google search on your name and look for anything that might be relevant about you. Just like a company, your image is essential to your success and your actions are always being judged by the public. Your private and public image are increasingly intertwined and often times you should consider how will this affect my future success before you post something publicly.
A lot of people see crypto as a means to help equal the playing field. Rather than tie people into systems controlled by large corporations, cryptocurrencies and force everyone to play by the same rules and governance is often controlled by the developers or stake holders. The proliferation of coins has meant that there is always an option for you to use that agrees with your terms, and coins making unpopular choices and forks run the risk of abandonment. The rise of the content economy has made companies like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Youtube fantastically wealthy on the content of other people. While some people do make money off of revenue sharing deals, the vast majority get nothing for their efforts and are subject to unilateral changes to the terms and conditions to how they operate by those companies.
Steem is meant to be the answer to that. All the content that you create on here has the potential to be upvoted thousands of times, and that directly translates into payment for doing so. No complex terms, no negations, all changes must be approved by community selected witnesses. Simple and fair. The media wing of You Inc. is no longer being exploited for the content it creates.
At least that's the idea. Steem is not without problems. Quality content languishes in obscurity while trash hits the trending page. Early adopters wield an incredible amount of power here. Getting started here can be quite daunting to new users (hell it's even hard sometimes to get an account). Sometimes it seems like one big experiment and it's not 100% certain that it will work out. But in a lot of ways those problems mirror what you see in the real-world market place and the way you succeed here is the same. You can't just sign up and expect to earn anything here. You have to build a brand. You have to hone your skills and put out a product that is valuable to the market. You have to learn to promote yourself and align with organizations that will give your content a boost. You have to invest time and money and find innovative ways to leverage the resources you have acquired to gain more value. Learning how to be successful here on Steem will help give you the tools you need to be successful in the rest of your endeavors as well.
The new world economy emphasizes a lot of the same things philosophical ideas that permeate the cryptocommunity. Independence, self-reliance, and adaptability are the keys to success in both arenas. Learning how to navigate both are going to be key to achieving success in the future. We are all our on bosses now and responsible for the challenges that entails.