Here are some of my high-level life goals. Some are pretty universal and bland; others are specifically mine:
- Have a positive, progressive impact on the world
- Live comfortably
- Work on projects I'm proud of in collaboration with great people, which allow me to fulfil the previous two goals
- Be able to choose my location, and have the freedom to discover new ones
- (Eventually) have a family, give them the attention they deserve, and ensure that my children, too, understand that they're citizens of the whole world instead of one specific place
That last bullet might read as being a little odd, but it's borne from necessity. I was born in the Netherlands, grew up in England (with gaps in Austria and North Carolina), went to university in Scotland, and now live in California. Part of my family can be traced back to the Mayflower; other parts come from Switzerland, Ukraine and Indonesia. My ancestors and contemporaries have fled pogroms, helped reform religions, lived through internment camps, built up lives over and over again. My relatives are scattered across nations and continents. In order to be connected with my wider family, I have to travel. I'd hope that my children would be connected with their wider family too!
This is both the blessing and the curse of the third-culture kid: I'm not tethered to any real sense of patriotism for any particular place (and don't feel much empathy for the sense of patriotism that others hold). Family is my nationality, and I feel relatively free to try new places. But because that extended family is scattered, I need to have a certain budget - one that is obviously multiplied with a family of my own. And I need to have freedom to travel.
I'm lucky to work in software, and I'm lucky to have been born where and when I was; all of these things are feasibly within reach for me. Nonetheless, it's a life outside the box: the world is still set up for people who live in more or less one place for their whole adult lives. My challenge, then, is to engineer the life I want to lead. (Of course, this is probably a good exercise for anyone.)
As time goes on, I think more and more people will be like me, with scattered families and backgrounds, who want to live in a way that's tailored for them, rather than dictated by tradition or a cookie-cutter mold. One possible future of work isn't with vast corporations, as it largely still is today, but with individuals loosely joining around projects. Just as Just In Time automation allows for working inventory to be minimized and components to be sourced as they are needed, Just In Time employment allows workers will specialized skills to join projects on demand.
That doesn't quite cover the whole story, though: domain knowledge is important, and consistency across a project over time is valuable. My value to latakoo isn't just my knowledge of web development and technology strategy; it's also my knowledge of latakoo itself. At it's simplest, I understand why past decisions were made, and can make better future decisions with this knowledge in mind. Not only that, but "Just In Time" employment leans heavily in the direction of the employer; employment benefit, not to mention a steady income, remain a very important consideration for the vast majority of people. Nobody wants to be without health insurance, for example (in the countries where that's necessary). Or mortgage payments / rent money.
So employment isn't going away, even for folks like me - but I work from an office that I pay for myself, in a city by myself. So there's nothing stopping me from working from the Bahamas for a week, or from London, or Singapore. Well, okay, there's the money, but the effect on the company is exactly the same. I'm still in the chat channel, still on Google Hangout, still answering calls and emails, and still pushing work. Other organizations work in similar ways: Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, prides itself on this.
This is possible because of the Internet, and it opens up some other new possibilities for employment and living: a world where your choice of city and country don't affect your employment potential, and where salaries are untethered from geography. In the future, as more and more projects become geographically decentralized, it's easy to imagine a software engineer's salary normalizing across borders. It's also easy to imagine choosing a place to live like you'd choose a car: efficiency, the experience, cost effectiveness, your values. It's also easy to imagine citizenship becoming more fluid, at least for skilled knowledge workers.
I'm looking forward to a time when people aren't locked into geography, and I'm doing my best to start avoiding that lock-in now.