I mean I think another part of it is the internet and increasing computer literacy means we’ve automated a lot of the old admin jobs that had to be done by desk workers. Used to be anyone who could type and had any sort of business major from any college could land some kind of job flying a desk, updating windows to display 20 instead of 19 in the calendar or whatever BS. Nowadays teenagers can write bots to do that in an afternoon.

Weird shower thought: as a guy who’s nearly 30 now, I remember there just being A LOT of “office work sucks” media being on the TV. And it lead to a lot of my peers all being like “oh that must be why our parents are so miserable, working in an office, I never want to do that” so we all like went to trade school or graphic design college to try and become some freelancer laborer, and 15 years later a lot of us are exhausted and underpaid. I know a lot of people who today are like “yah know maybe majoring in accounting and getting a job where I sit in an air conditioned room and spend most of my time playing flash games while pretending to work wasn’t so bad, maybe my parents generation was blaming office work on their misery when it was actually something else.”

But I’ve never worked in an office so maybe it does actually suck that much. Idk.

This kind of shit isn’t surprising, occasional exercises in self awareness and depreciation are a clever way for people to come off as more good faith than they actually are. Often people in power will preformatively cop to their own faults and hypocrisies in order to lend themselves an air of humility.

I will never be as cool as teenaged Chinese communist rock guitarist guy. Nobody ever will.

Uh, if I remember the episode they’re referring to correctly it’s just the space around this one planet that effected by FTL travel so the speed limit it only enforced there.