Bookmark #725

In life, you meet a variety of people who do various things, but sit down with a marketer for thirty minutes, and it will be enough. You will learn everything they are and everything they have to say in just half an hour. Why is that? Because it is a job of make-believe, and worse, it is a job that, more often than not, is nefarious. It is the equivalent of the character in some fable who first appears friendly on the first few pages but later turns out to be the antagonist. Where arts and sciences are the heart and the head of humanity, marketing is the appendix. We could do with fewer marketers, analysts, and fewer pretend jobs. The world needs more artists and thinkers and more engineers and tinkerers.

In saying artists, I do not mean those who merely practice a skill but those who use their medium to say something. There is always a difference between the two. The artist and the craftsman are different, and they can identify who is who really well. But the waters are muddier for the world, and often, I notice people cannot tell the two apart. And when I say engineer, I do not necessarily mean those with a degree but people who think like an engineer. It could be your local MacGyver who builds things that make the lives of others easier in one way or another, too—using their skill to do something.

To say and do something meaningful built what we call the world today. The others came along recently and have managed to infiltrate and fool us all. They say that we will all soon be out of a job. But the arts and sciences will remain till the end of time, for it is essential to the human spirit to think of something new and to build something that makes living easier. That is all our species has been consistently good at.

No, threatened are those who will soon be exposed for who they are: frauds with pretend jobs that change nothing on their best days and everything for the worse on others. Never before has humanity been more filled with people responsible for so much of nothing, and now, it seems they are all scared. But the arts and the sciences will remain as they have, and they will adapt to the world around them and push it forward as they have.

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