And: where to look for such jobs? What would be the process to find them with any chance of success?
I hope the question in the title is general enough that more people might find it useful, I’m sure I can’t be the only one. I’m going to include some extra details specific to myself below, but you can just ignore them if you want to.
- I have no education beyond high school and no useful skills, although I do have a couple of years worth of work experience at this point. I don’t really have the will to learn anything new for the purpose of getting a job any more.
- I have been unbelievably lucky in that the circumstances allow me to live on minimum wage in humane conditions, and beyond the basic expenses I have nothing to spend money on anyway. So it doesn’t matter to me how much I get paid.
- I spend all of my free time on things like reading, drawing, writing, thinking, occasionally learning something new. If I could spend even just a couple of work hours every day with a pen and paper and an Internet connection, it would make me a bit happier.
I wouldn’t call any of those menial tasks skills. Like at that point you might as well list breathing and eating.
A skill is something that any random off the street couldn’t get up to speed on in a day or two.
I think a much better definition of a skill is “anything you can get better at”. Take the other commenter who pulled nails out of boards. Sure a random guy off the street could probably do it, but compared to someone whose been doing it for years theyd be a total schmuck. If you watched that experienced worker you’d see how much faster they are, the efficiency and precision in their motions, their ability to instantly analyze the best way to her each and every nail out. There’s a whole genre of online videos of these types of people - experts in seemingly “menial” work and they do numbers because they make people stop and marvel.
That’s awesome if the point of the job is entertainment, but if the work is actually just removing nails from a board, it doesn’t really matter if people stop and gawk, in fact that’d be a detriment as they’d get in the way. And the value difference between the guy removing nails for 20 years and the guy who’s been on the job for an hour is close to nil. As long as the nails come out in a reasonable time, that’s all that matters. And because removing nails from boards is not something that takes any inherent skill, somebody who’s been on the job for an hour will be proficient at the job.
When talking about skilled work vs unskilled work, the definition isn’t “Something you can get better at”, it’s “Something you must get better at to do the job sufficiently”
Sufficiently, proficient - too arbitrary. There’s “skill” associated with all work and therefore all work is skilled work. There’s value in people being good at virtually every kind of work (excluding vulture capitalism, etc.)
EDIT: Also FWIW, if think there’s no difference between the 1 hour vs. 20 year nail puller, my guess is you’re never been even REMOTELY close to this kind of work in your life.