Where Have The Opportunities Gone?

I’m a little jealous of my grandfather. He lived in a time where so few people could read or write that just being literate afforded him a civil servant job for life. The same job inherited by my father. But that same job was out of reach to me, despite not only being literate as well but, unlike my literal forefathers, also tech-literate with a bachelor’s degree. Even my father was confused why a position offered to him, through virtue of nepotism, wasn’t open to me. This anecdote is symptomatic of a downward trend; the loss of opportunities.

Look to the past and you’ll find tales of people almost effortlessly ascending class and wealth through a combination of merit, charm, and sheer luck. Charlie Chaplin was sent for at the age of 19 to cross the Atlantic and join the burgeoning film industry with no greater credits to his name than word of mouth. Steven Spielberg built his career by trespassing on studio lots, avoiding arrest because people liked his moxy. Aston Kutcher, the actor turned tech investor, was quite literally pulled aside in a shopping mall and given a modelling career. The 90s were awash in spec script sales, paying aspiring writers millions to write scripts that would never get made.

I know this all sounds very film centric, but it extends out to tech and business fields as well. Google, Amazon, Facebook, YouTube, Microsoft, and Apple, titans today, practically struggled to catch the money freely tossed their way from venture capitalists who didn’t even know what they were investing in. Even in more grounded avenues there was a clear path of progression within companies; you start at the bottom and work your way up. Many managers and CEOs boasted about starting off as overworked interns.

This was a time that seemed to not just welcome the new but championed it. Job seekers with little-to-no experience were accepted purely because of their willingness to turn up on Monday morning. Novice performers and creatives were given their starts with small jobs as day-players or opening acts. Inexperience and novelty weren’t handicaps to opportunities; they were crucial for them, seen as a way to get in on the ground floor of something big.

We’re far from all that now. People struggle to get entry-level jobs now without years of experience, glowing references, and someone on the inside. Films, shows, and books can’t even be considered unless there’s an established IP is attached; not talent, branding. And people in general have become so wary of taking a chance on anything new that they are beginning to respond aggressively to anything outside of their norm.

What happened?

When we think of opportunities, we think of taking risks. What goes unacknowledged is how often those risks, while romanticised as being daring, were allowed to happen because there was a buffer of comfort. Back-ups, surplus profits, unions, thriving economies, and even a healthy dose of ignorance to the risks. Many experimental films that became break-out franchises, small business that would later become huge brands, and humble singers who went from bars to sold-out arenas were possible because there was a feeling that you could take the risk and still be okay. If you have the money to burn, who cares if you made a loss, right? But over the last thirty years we’ve seen a shift to risk aversion, from both businesses and consumers.

The economic prosperity of the neo-liberal world came crashing down with the credit crunch of 2008. That endless well of money, good will, and entrepreneurial spirit had dried up, especially as more stringent regulations and corporate control came into effect to ensure nothing like this would happen again. The 2008 crash was the straw that broke the camel’s back, especially after similar houses of cards came tumbling down with the Dot Com Bubble, Enron, and even the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. The time of just blindly trusting money men was taking a backseat (for now).

This time coincides with the rise of MBA degrees. As third-level education became expected, the days of working from the bottom of a company up were gone, at least for those who hoped to become managers, executives, and board members. Why promote someone who has dedicated years of their life to a company when you can hire someone who has studied how to run any business. This was advantageous as the nature of enterprise shifted from specific goods and services to more profit focused entities keeping shareholders happy. You don’t need an expert in Coca Cola production when Coca Cola’s business isn’t reliant on sales anymore. You need someone who will do anything to make the line go up, even if it means dismantling the company itself. And the irony of all this is even if you wanted to work your way up the corporate ladder, good luck getting the job in the first place.

The days of getting a job with a resume in one hand and firm handshake in the other are long gone. Resumes are now exclusively passed through corporate databases scanning hundreds of applicants to find the most optimal fit for the job. And if they don’t, they’ll just repost the position in perpetuum; they’d rather everyone be unemployed than risk hiring you.

What we have here is capital, from companies and consumers, being closely guarded. It’s hard to take a chance on something when your natural instinct is to hoard what money you do have.

Along with needing to avoid colliding with regulators and scaring investors, companies, in particular media companies, must curry favour with advertisers. Despite the shift from traditional broadcasts to streaming and social media, advertisers still hold massive sway over content. The promise of the Internet as a wild west for mature, experimental, and niche media has been eroded to appease advertisers who don’t wish for their products to appear alongside less mainstream material.

Arguably, “adpocalypses” are worse online than in traditional media. Offensive material would rarely be allowed on national broadcasts in the first place, but even if there were they were shoved far into the night to avoid notice. Online, however, the Internet was built upon the bizarre, the surreal, the offensive, and the niche. While the Internet is supposedly a bastion of free speech, there is a general understanding that more “mature” material isn’t pushed as much due to advertiser expectations. I say “mature” because even relatively innocuous content like video essays, how-to videos, and vlogs can get buried by algorithms that promote bombastic, sensationalised videos that go viral. It’s the reason why algospeak is so prevalent online that people have to speak in code about sensitive topics that need more open discussion, not less. “Unalive” makes me want to unalive myself.

But advertisers aren’t the only ones moralising content. Conservative culture warriors have taken their crusade out of the churches and into the message boards, movie theatres, and even the libraries (which is strange considering that’s the last place they’d ever think of going themselves.) What’s unique now is how these culture warriors are supporting one another across the world, with a particular focus on Europe and North America, feigning the appearance of organic campaigning groups. Credit where it’s due, they’re highly organised and efficient, able to generate viral campaigns that have forced major brands to apologise for slights against their strict sensibilities. With the lurch to the right in many countries, we’ve seen companies and brands step back from their lukewarm recognition of events, holidays, and cultures.

It's just safer to remember the past. Oh, remember the past! The 80s! The 90s! The 00s! While every generation pine for their formative years, the wistful longing for begone eras has saturated media for the last twenty years. Legacy sequels, reboots, established IPs, and remakes have dominated our media. Streaming has made it possible for the near entirety of human culture to be available to everyone whenever they want. Tragically, this longing for the past in less introspective and more self-indulgent. Why risk greenlighting a new sci-fi film when you can just have Star Wars again! Why support an up-and-coming musician who sounds like a modern-day David Bowie when you can just have a David Bowie biopic, or remastered albums, or even some of his demos since he’s not here to stop us? We are now using CGI and AI to resurrect actors for cameos and publicity decades after they’ve died. Somehow the success of Harry Potter never translated into more sales for unknown fantasy writers, but instead movies, games, spin-off books, theme parks, audiobooks, plays, radio plays, and now a new TV series. Nostalgia is so pervasive that we yearn for times we weren’t even present for. Twenty-year-old women wish they were 1950s era tradwives. Teenage boys earnestly think of themselves as stoic Romans or crusading Templar knights. Nostalgia has become a form of escapism; we’re so scared of risk, we don’t even want to be in the same century as it.

Of course, the world has changed drastically in this time as well. Streaming has upended the media ecosystem. There has always been a healthy market for low, mid, and big budget films, but home releases on VHS and, later, DVD made it possible for films to turn a profit months or even years after their release, going on to become cult classics. Famously the actor Matt Damon explained on the show Hot Ones that with DVDs largely obsolete, those mid-tier films that would have become profitable with sales either stopped being made or went straight to streaming, becoming lost in the monthly churn. Another great explanation comes from animator and comedian Thomas Ridgewell, better known as TomSka of ASDFmovie fame, who said that with the rise of online comedy, traditional avenues for comedians and comedy writers dried as sketch shows were unable to compete with the cheaper, faster, and more popular alternative. The cruel irony here is that segments from old sketch shows have proven very popular on short form platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts.

On the whole, visual media is dominating everything now. Audio podcasts and shows are now being incentivised to pivot to video. Literacy rates are at an all-time low, with many lamenting that we’ve entered a “post-literate world”, only further pressuring publishers to double-down on trends and sales rather than quality, merit, and breadth, limiting opportunities for aspiring authors.

And while the Internet has expanded the range of possibilities for many around the world, platforms, desperate to keep users in the name of retention, are curating personal feeds. These algorithms can so perfectly match you with whatever will keep you scrolling that it’s almost guaranteed that you will see completely different slants on recent events than the person sitting beside you with their own unique feed. While subcultures and niches have always existed, the loss of a monoculture has made it so facts about the world being spherical, the efficacy of medicine, and the atrocities of history aren’t just debated but openly and proudly denied. This fragmentation has become so all-consuming that people now react negatively when presented with media that isn’t catered exclusively to their individual tastes. This feeds into the culture warrior mindset I mentioned earlier, as well as “Bean Soup Theory”, the phenomenon where people can’t comprehend not being the target audience. This is the crux of a major hurdle stopping many people today from even permitting themselves and others the opportunity to try something new; cringe.

The French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault used the metaphor of a panopticon to explain how the implication of being perceived can be used as a form of reinforced discipline of sanctioned norms. A panopticon is a type of prison design where a watchtower is placed in the centre with all cells surrounding it, effectively giving guards a full 360-degree view of all prisoners. The psychological effect is astounding; the mere idea that a guard COULD see you at any time was enough to make prisoners believe they were at all times being personally watched. This is an example of the Spotlight Effect; the belief that we’re all being watched and judged far more than we really are. While cringe is nothing new, the influx of constant media bombardment, especially reinforcing algorithm sanctioned norms, stifles any chance of experiencing something new. This has become so endemic that even hobbies that involve anything but media consumption have become guilty pleasures; embarrassing habits that must be hidden from view. Between being overworked, underpaid, and discouraged, opportunities that would have naturally arisen from our hobbies and interests have been smothered in the name of avoiding risk. Cringe is now just a heckle thrown around all too willingly to denote anything not catering to the watcher.

That is what we’ve become; watchers. We’re spending hours of our day watching others do what we wish we could. We’re watching others control our lives. We’re watching regurgitated rubbish being spewed out for us. We’re watching as the worst people in the world terrorise innocents, controlling our lives. We’re just watching. Wasting away. Rotting. Hopeless. Doing nothing. Waiting for an opportunity.

I think in some way we’ve misunderstood what opportunities really are. I think we liken them to chance, or luck. We’ve bought into a romanticised image of the past as though it was filled with endless possibilities. Yes, it was easier to get a job. Yes, it was easier to become rich. Yes, it was easier to be a success. It was also easier to die at forty. It was easier to abduct kids. We all pine for simpler times, but the reason they were simpler times is because people were simple-minded back then. They still are not, but still.

My grandfather got his job because he was literate. With all due respect to my grandfather, who I’m sure was a clever man, but that wasn’t a high bar to get over back then. You were considered a genius if you could spell out your own name. The Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh found fame because he was a culchie who could read! That was considered a miracle back then. (Fun fact: he used to wank off to my grandmother on the bus.) If comparison is the thief of joy, then historical romanticism is pickpocketing the future of hope. Yes, there were new opportunities in the past, but only for what was new back then. For every person who found a job as a mechanic, a carriage driver lost their livelihood. For every electrical engineer assembling rotary phones, an operator became unemployed.

It wasn’t perfect even then, and it most certainly wasn’t as obvious as it appears to us now. We have the hindsight to understand how good things would get. Those same people had to live through the horrors of wars, famines, unrest, and catastrophe. We’re just as clueless now about our future, with recessions, pandemics, AI, and trade wars, as they were about their own chaotic world. That didn’t stop them from seizing their opportunities, and it shouldn’t stop us.

The word “opportunity” comes from the Latin “Ob Portus”, meaning, roughly, “towards port.”

Opportunity doesn’t present itself obviously. It’s a vague dot in the distant horizon. It only comes into view when we make the decision to head towards it first. We must make the decision to risk being wrong, and to change course if needs be, to accept our mistake and continue anyway, regardless of how foolish we’ll look. We must be willing to not only take a chance on ourselves but also give chances to others. Listen to a musician you’ve never heard of. Buy an indie game that was just uploaded. Watch a film at random. (Maybe give a certain writer a tip?) The worst that can happen is you gave someone a chance.

…

I imagine my grandfather must have been laughed at for bothering to learn to read and write.

“What good will that do!”

“Sure, you don’t need to read to work the docks!”

“You’re not going to Trinity anyway, so what’s the point!”

“School’s a waste when you could be making money!”

Whether it was my grandfather, the priests running the school, or my great-grandparents, someone saw an opportunity in his future, off in the distance, as unclear and as uncertain as our own. And though they couldn’t know for certain, they still made the decision that led to his grandson telling his story and the opportunities that came from it.

#HI