Chances are that your job, like mine, involves pressing buttons. Sounds easy, but it's actually challenging. There's a lot of those buttons in front of you, and you have to press the right ones in the right order, all day long. If that happens, things go okay for you, unless the people who tell you which buttons to press have an oopsie-poopsie and destroy the economy. Then you're out of a job either way, and have to find a new place to push buttons.
Things didn't used to be like this, everyone on YouTube who makes money from talking into a camera about how things used to be tell us. Once upon a time, every job involved some kind of backbreaking physical labour in vassaldom to an unaccountable, distant landlord. If you pressed a button at all, it was to repair your clothes before heading out for another twelve hours of threshing wheat. Then someone invented the office.
It started innocently enough. Once we had to add a bunch of numbers for stuff like taxes, it made sense to not do it on your kitchen table. Or out in a field. Then Charles Babbage got into a fight with his screw manufacturer, and all of a sudden everything was about computers, computers, computers. Which are still cool, don't get me wrong – they're my favourite way to play computer games – but nobody thinks that feels like work. You're still tired at the end of the day, but without feeling good about being tired, like when you make a fence.
I think I've figured out why. Think about computers when you were a kid. Bigger, right? Computers have been getting smaller, and less substantial, for a really long time. I say we go in the other direction and make computers fucking enormous. Make those buttons big enough that you have to jump on them really hard up and down. You'll get your workout, you'll go home happy after a day of Excel, and more importantly your boss probably won't make so many fucking meetings if it means he has to manually crank the Zoom machine to keep the enormous 1950s video cameras working.
