Plot twist: Graph was mad with AI
Project Manager was #1 but they told the artist it didn’t fit the scope.
Graphics designer maybe, creative, probably
But artist?
Negro please
They were probably asked an open ended question. Artist is likely the most common answer given due to the simple fact that more people can think of that job compared to PR manager when asked
A quick image search returned this
https://mothership.sg/2020/06/milieu-survey-sunday-times-essential/
So many commenters are missing crucial context to this infographic.
This was released during peak covid and I mean PEAK as in June 2020, global lockdowns, high mortality rates, shortages of essentials. In case anyone has a short memory, the world as we knew it practically ground to a halt.
Not to take away anything from artists but essential in this context meant essential to the basic human needs. Health, Nutrition, Sanitation.
The world you knew ground to a halt.
I was working in healthcare at the time. I was doing 60 hours a week, home, work, home, work, home, work. Nonstop.
The world did not stop because you couldn’t go into an office to sit and work.
Maybe they worked remote before and during the pandemic
Telemarketer should’ve been number 1.
Haven’t you noticed? People love to be advertised at these days.
Yes, my PR Specialist told me so it has to be true.
Ignoring phone calls is the highlight of my day. Every day. For years.
Kill me please.
Unfortunately sales calls are extremely effective.
Which column?
Anything advertising related is utterly useless.
Is that why pretty much every company spends so much money on it?
Almost everyting you consume is the product of advertising, whether you like it or not.
Advertising doesn’t create things, it only shoves them at my face. I don’t need to be told to buy milk, I’ll buy milk if I want milk.
You can tell this is a poll of what people perceive to be the important jobs because doctor is #1. The most important jobs by sector in order of importance for developed nations is
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power supply- we all need electricity and few of us have the ability to generate it ourselves
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water supply- getting enough clean water for your day to cook and wash is a near full time job. For Americans a gallon of water is roughly 8lbs and your average toilet uses 3-5 gallons per flush. It would take much of the day to get and purify the water you use
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sanitation workers- this the poll got right. The folks collecting waste do more directly for public health than most doctors could hope to do.
your average toilet uses 3-5 gallons per flush
I’m pretty sure toilets generally use 1.6 gallons per flush, and that’s a legal mandate.
Source: used to have an autistic obsession with them.
What about the least essential?
- Tax consultants - helping companies avoid contributing to society
- Marketeers - manipulating people into buying worse products for higher prices
- Middle management - causing a lot of fuzz while doing nothing of significance.
Just to name a few. An artists contribution may be abstract but it’s certainly there. There are others that actively sabotage society and very often they make a lot of money.
I’m honestly surprised that cleaner and garbage collector are as high up there on the list as they are because those seem to be jobs that society generally looks down on.
At least the graphic has that going for it.
Wonder if it was a poll during 2020. COVID really highlighted cleaners’ jobs as essential.
I wonder if doctors get elevated on these polls because people feel like it is a more unattainable skill.
I would imagine a lot of people (falsely) assume that it would be easy to plop people into power plants to keep them running, but harder to replace doctors.
My completely unknowledgeable take is that if we had to pick and choose people for the post apocalypse job hunt, we would want way more mechanics and engineers than doctors. Doctors need a lot of hard to obtain stuff to do the most doctor-ey part of their jobs, and if we aren’t worried about laws and regulations, then we don’t need them for things like prescriptions.
Most of what they would be needed for in that scenario to me seems like emergency care, like first aid, which you don’t really need all the superfluous med school training for.
Meanwhile, the hydroelectric dam that the new post apocalypse group is forming at needs a lot of varied disciplines and specialties just to keep it running.
I love that hypothetical apocalyptical world were babies apparently don’t exist, and therefore, a large chunk of the deaths that were pervasive in humanity until not too long ago also stopped existing
How is the doctor going to provide any legitimate care that the new technology of the world brings if there is no one to generate the power or source the complex and fragile medications and tools.
Do you think doctors will be administrating epidurals and doing c sections when the works ends? Hell, modern doctors only really work because of an entire industry of health care professionals that support them.
A doctor without pharmacology, engineering, clean rooms, manufacturing facilities, etc. is just a guy who can do first aid (and that’s assuming they worked and studied in a field that would deal with immediate trauma scenarios). Doctors have benefits because they can capitalize on the support system that is international health care.
I have more confidence that an engineer could figure out how to repair, assemble, and operate an MRI machine than a doctor. I also have more confidence in the care that an EMT would provide if I’m lying bleeding.
90 percent of doctors are just dudes who mis diagnose women and minorities and spend most of their time writing prescriptions for tylenol.
When it comes down to what is actually necessary, I think most doctors are not, so if we are ranking professions based on their importance, I would rank the jobs that even enable doctors to do what they do higher.
Also, not to be morbid, but humanity fared pretty well up until now, and for most of the few hundred thousand years we have been around, we handled babies the same way the rest of the animal kingdom did, by just continuing to spit them out and hope for the best.
Hell, the biggest medical advances aren’t even done by doctors they are done by scientists, doctors just apply shit they read out of a book.
lol was your ex a doctor? you’re not wrong that a lot of what we do today is dependent on massive supply chains and the work of vast armies of allied healthcare workers, engineers, scientists, and pharma, but most doctors offer common sense remedies for common ailments and can be as simple as rest and fluids for a cold and heating packs for a sore back. even as someone who did trauma surgery for a while and now does robotic surgery, sure I won’t be able to reconstruct your abdominal wall and safely reroute your intestines without modern anesthesia, ICUs, and antibiotics but even in modern times there are days that consist of hours of scraping old infected wounds, lancing boils/popping pimples, and talking about diet strategies to avoid hemorrhoids.
emts are valuable to stabilize and transport but can’t care for things long term. engineers can build mris but can’t interpret the fuzzy squiggles that pop up on the screen. I can distill my own alcohol for sterilization, hand weave silk/cotton sutures, and sharpen crude scalpels without modern technology. the biggest value I bring is my years of seeing sick people and figuring out what’s actually bothering them without WebMD or ai, even if I don’t have high tech solutions, ruling out the most dangerous potential diagnoses and finding the rare zebras.
edit: I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you’re either very young or very lucky with good health. not that I’m hoping you get sick but eventually all of us end up needing doctors to help us and when you do you’ll see what I mean. even though I don’t currently need any doctors myself, I’m very glad there are people out there that can help me when I need it.
For modern society, sure. For foundational society, you don’t have any societies without Farmers, Educators, and some sort of doctor.
We had hunter gatherer societies with none of those jobs.
Sure, but we didn’t have even ancient cities without them
Cites come after societies form though so they aren’t foundational.
A quick image search returned this
https://mothership.sg/2020/06/milieu-survey-sunday-times-essential/
So many commenters are missing crucial context to this infographic.
This was released during peak covid and I mean PEAK as in June 2020, global lockdowns, high mortality rates, shortages of essentials. In case anyone has a short memory, the world as we knew it practically ground to a halt.
Not to take away anything from artists but essential in this context meant essential to the basic human needs. Health, Nutrition, Sanitation.
I assume this is why we hear about foreign actors targeting power stations more than hospitals.
Without power all those hospitals are nearly useless. Sure there are backup generators but they only run the bare minimum and only for so long.
Disable the power grid and the affects will be catastrophic on any developed nation. All the food will be spoiled within a few days to a few weeks. No business will be able to run including gas stations. Most communication will be down.
The whole area grinds to a halt untill power can be restored. Do enough damage to take out the power for a week to a large city and the damage will be incalculable. Not to mention the lives lost in that time.
This is also why GWB tried to redo the US electrical grid but failed. It is a huge target that needs to be updated.
I had similar thoughts. Someone more knowledgeable would probably call them “healthcare professionals”, or “healthcare practitioners”, not “doctors and nurses”.
And you’re right, as important as they are, they can’t do their jobs without the infrastructure you’re pointing out. Power and water are more essential, as they enable everyone all of the time. And waste piling up would create serious problems fairly quickly.
This reminds me of the Silo series, where every level thinks they keep the Silo running.
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Art is important for people’s well being, which is important for essential workers’ ability to work. Weird thst artists are considered less essential than telemarketers.
I recall watching a singer saying something like the following during an interview “If art and culture are so worthless, return all the time you spent watching movies and series, return all the time you spent listening to music, all the poems and lyrics you sang with friends or to loved ones. I won’t ask you to return the stories you read because it’s clear you don’t read.”
I can possibly see an argument that “artist” isn’t an essential job because people make loads of art when it’s not their job anyway. Nobody’s doing telemarketing as their hobby
However I very much doubt that this was the actual context for whatever this graphic was trying to show
I can’t even joke “when has art ever sold dick pills?” because colorful gas station packages conceivably outsell telemarketers on that front.
Always remember, music is also art. Now imagine a world where theres no music. You can’t listen to anything while driving, riding the bus, going shopping etc.
You can listen to things while driving, but it is either NPR, talk radio, or church sermons.
Not NPR, that’s writing and journalism, which id argue is definitely an art.
Have fun with 500 versions of Alex Jones though.
No, there’s even art in Alex Jones. Remember bad art exists and is still art.
“The other 499 Alex Joneses are turning the frogs gay!”
I think I’d kill myself if I had to listen to NPR’s Up First without the jingle. I think that jingle keeps me sane.
I don’t even… this thought is so vile. It’s bumming me out and I already agreed with you, I didn’t need this analogy. Fuck that’s depressing… FUCK!
People might actually start singing again
I don’t listen to anything in any of those scenarios.
Many people are not listening music 24/7.
Music is nice, I don’t say it’s not. But you could 100% live without it.
It’s not that I disagree with the principle, but on the mentioned occastions, I will ~99% of the time listen to podcasts or audio books instead of music.
You might be shocked to learn that books is art, too.
I mean everything could be considered art if you look at it from the right angle :o
Sure, but novels, paintings, and songs are traditional arts, they are art first and foremost.
Books are a creative endeavor. Putting the same screw 10000 isn’t a creative endeavor.
The code I write might be considered abstract art by some, but I’m a developer, not an artist. Much like how someone who writes books get catagorized as an author even though books can be considered art.
Yeah it would suck but it is pretty unnecessary in terms of survival and productivity.
Social media manager and telemarketers are far more useless though. So I disagree with the list
Hard disagree. Humanity flourished when we had the free time to think, play, and create instead of just hunting and gathering all the time. Language, collaboration, imagination all grew thanks to art.
Culture doesn’t exist without art.
The rest of that column is basically “mosquitos”, blegh. Maybe we can get some birds to eat them.
the 23% of people who didn’t vote for garbage collector… Are they hoarders?
They’re the people who just haul their own trash to the dump.
I know they meant painter but graphic designer is probably one of the most important jobs if we’re talking about business. A company without some sort of graphic is dead in the water.
I dig it!
Yeah? Well… Who designed their font?
I think that font might be Proxima Nova, which was designed by Mark Simonson. When looking up that name, I learned that this design was inspired by “the roundness of geometric sans serifs like Futura” and “the proportions of modern grotesques like Helvetica.”, so I suppose we should also tip our hats to Paul Renner (Futura), and Max Midinger and Eduard Hoffman (Helvetica)
(N.b. I am only moderately knowledgeable in typeface history. Any other nerds who enjoy learning may appreciate this random video
Guessing this might be non-essential workers as per covid lockdowns, ie how important it is for them to attend a workplace in person, but it’s definitely funnier if it is a ranked list of perceived importance to society, so let’s go with that
Its right about telemarketing
non-essential jobs is about everyone with a MBA
I was told once there was an MBA program offered through work and I could think was something like, “Why would I want a degree in bull shit when I already have a useful degree?” (Mechanical Engineering)
I used to think this was true while working for a B2B company as a graphic designer. Everything just seemed pointless like I wasn’t contributing anything meaningful to the world. But I do think that art in its many forms contributes meaningfully to culture in general and can also be quite powerful when used well. History of graphic design shows just how influential designs were in Nazi Germany and how similar techniques are still used today. Then there is the matter of UI design and how it’s increasingly become essential today. While most applications it’s fine to have a frustrating piece of garbage, UI is rather important for things like medical systems, car displays, and other areas where getting it wrong could mean life or death. Unfortunately my job is still pretty useless to society regardless of these points made. I’ll go back to my corner now.
I was thinking along the same lines - art is important for distributing information.
I used to think this was true while working for a B2B company as a graphic designer. Everything just seemed pointless like I wasn’t contributing anything meaningful to the world.
You could say similar things about company doctors that just try to get people back to work without caring for their wellbeing. Companies do not necessarily bring out the best possible use of skills.
company doctors
Never heard of this outside of medical facilities. I don’t know how it could possibly be cost effective to employ a doctor because management thinks people are out sick too much—fire the fucking manager that can’t keep the office staffed.
As someone who works for a major healthcare company - they hire doctors so they can claim to have legitimacy in denying claims. If their doctors say that something is “unnecessary” or there is an alternative, it’s better for legal purposes than just any old person saying it. Even though we all know those doctors aren’t the ones in charge and are most likely pushed by the people above to make certain decisions.
There are countries where you cannot fire people just because they got sick. In those countries you’d have to keep paying the sick people and it becomes cost effective to employ a doctor to help them get to work again.
But what about telephone sanitisers, account executives, hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, and management consultants?
Is this the list from Hitchhiker’s Guide?
yes
Those go on the other ship
