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Occupations, Avocations, and Work |
Within the civilized sphere of the Sephirotic areas, and the utopian or nanotopian societies that comprise them, there are few beings who need toil for daily bread, water and air (or their clade's equivalents). Consequently, there are few who have what an Industrial Age baseline would call a job. However, most sapients and transapients have one or more occupations, professions, or avocations. Motivations for this vary considerably. Many do their work out of altruism, or out of a desire for social status. Nearly all clades have innate programming to do some useful work. Human nearbaselines, for instance, usually retain drives which cause them to spend up to four hours a day on useful activity, just as their Palaeolithic ancestors did, although in a few cases (especially that of pet humans) that trait has been bred out of the line. Some AIs and vecs have even more stringent requirements, and, like human nearbaselines, show personal and societal distress if they cannot work. Transapients add another layer to this. For reasons of their own, many (but not all) apply memetic engineering to reinforce or even enhance tendencies to seek work. They might be doing this as part of a higher-toposophic ecology/economy, or perhaps they simply regard it as good social and emotional maintenance of their sapient populations (and a way of mitigating baseline hyperdependency syndrome), or they might have other, less explicable reasons. The memetic push towards an occupation is most apparent in various sorts of propaganda and overt social programs, but beneath these is a much subtler and more powerful set of manipulations. Of course, in many cases a transapient may accomplish the same ends simply by refusing to provide certain kinds of support. The strongest memetic effects are evident in the NoCoZo, in which marketing induces a frenzied desire for higher status and material wealth, and citizens may endure extremely long hours of labour to meet these desires. However memetic pressures to work are evident to some degree in most polities of Sephirotic space.
Sapient beings outside the areas of direct Sephirotic control often scoff at the soft, complacent inhabitants of the "Nannytopias", but in many cases they too live in economies that are so abundant that work is only as demanding as they desire it to be. Modern Terragen technologies are simply that productive, and the physical resources of nearly any new star system are simply that rich. The edges of Terragen space are more apt to provide danger than they are hardship. Besides, many in the Sephirotic regions regard the peripheral polities, explorers and settlers as specialized (and in some cases unwitting) agents of Sephirotic powers. If they are correct, these are merely sapients and low level transapients who have been given a specialized sort of occupation: that of extending Terragen civilization.
Many of the professions that developed among human societies on Old Earth between the beginning of the Age of Agriculture and the end of the Interplanetary Age are still found throughout the Sephirotic sphere, though some have changed significantly with the times.
Merchants are as active as ever, though they are more likely to trade in information, rare elements, or unique items than in the bulk goods that are so easily available in a post-nanotech society. Art, new technological applications, unique locations, and many other things remain in limited supply. Even though basic food and drink are free, a particular food with the cachet of having been grown or created by a particular individual or in a particular place is not. Whether through barter, money, or more sophisticated and subtle media of exchange, sapients seek to acquire these things, by offering unique goods or services of their own, and specialists (merchants) naturally move in to facilitate these transactions, and profit from them.
In cultures that allow everyone to develop skills and knowledge equal to one or two Old Earth doctorates, human services are all the more valuable, especially to the elite. Waiters, musicians, actors (in virtual, interactive, live, or other performance media), writers, poets, virchists, and artists of all kinds are in great demand. This is in part because of their relative scarcity. In a world in which none need toil, there are fewer competitors for these kinds of positions. Those with the requisite skills and inclinations for these sorts of services are themselves rare and therefore extraordinarily valuable and highly regarded. The ability to display such skills oneself may be considered admirable, but the ability to employ others who have yet greater skill is as greatly admired. One who commands the services of a turingrade AI housekeeper, a nearbaseline human valet, and a vec gardener is indeed influential, especially when each of these could live quite nicely on eir own. The wealthiest neighbourhoods may employ a real vec or biont individual to sweep the streets. Real barmen, bouncers, doormen, barmaids, and the like are the mark of the most expensive sort of establishments, and the most exclusive resorts likewise have "real" staff rather than subturing automated systems.
Sports or games champions of one sort or another are as common and famous within polities and clades, and sometimes even across polities and clades, as they ever were in the ancient founding societies of the Terragen cultures. Naturally, and as was the case on Old Earth, each operates within a particular set of rules and technological restrictions. In ancient times, when there was only a single species involved, athletic events and games tournaments were already divided up according to age, sex, and weight, and allowed a restricted range of equipment. Rules for these events have grown many times more complex since then, but since in many cases they have had many centuries or millennia of refinement, they tend to function very well. Cheating is usually relatively easy to define and detect, and penalties are clear. Genetic engineering and other technologies may make this a matter of the best-designed contestant (constructed, born, or self-modified), but in the oldest contests the optimal designs have already been reached, and it is the less definable qualities of the individual that win the day. Individuals or groups within a particularly popular category may achieve fame that spreads across many hundreds of light years, even for something as apparently trivial as a race, a board game, or a team sport. Whether an individual participating in such contests might be regarded as an amateur or a professional is a matter of degree and definition, according to the fraction of lifespan spent and the amount of fame achieved.
Dedicated religious sorts are as common as ever: priests and priestesses, yogis, monks, nuns, holy hermits, theologians, mullahs, ayatollahs, and their equivalents are found in nearly every clade, working, praying, meditating, or performing rituals in service of their Lord, or the Gods, or some Divine Principle. Throughout the civilized galaxy and beyond there are religions that worship supernatural deities or "Gods", and others that worship natural deities (Archailects), and still others which may or may not revere a god or gods but are in pursuit of some more abstract good. Naturally each of these camps thinks the others are naïve and misguided at best.
The material world as well as the social world generates a need for professionals, as it has ever since the Age of Agriculture. These include scientists of all sorts. While fundamental research at the periphery of Terragen knowledge is now the domain of the higher-level transapient entities, understanding and applying that knowledge at the sapient level is another matter. So too is the discovery and understanding of new forms of life, new planets, and any number of phenomena which, while not fundamentally new are still novel to Terragen science. Other professions that persist, though sometimes in forms which would be difficult for an Information Age individual to recognize, include architects, doctors and nurses and other medical technicians, mechanics, engineers, and urban planners.
Even the most indulgent nanotopia prohibits some activities, whether for the convenience of the governing beings, or for the good of the society as a whole, or to protect individuals from themselves or each other. Where there are prohibitions there are those who would break them, and therefore there are criminals. Most of these are amateurs and one-time criminals, but wherever the angelnetting sports a gap, or is lacking, there are professionals as well; everything from smugglers of antiquities to drug dealers and bodyjackers. That even the tightest angelnets fail to capture all criminals is sometimes taken to be a sign that the transapients are not as omniscient as they pretend. Others aver that some criminals are allowed to exist as part of a larger social program.
Even the most utopian societies have their disputes, and in a world without great need there are still misfits: criminals other than the professionals. In the distant past these were often the result of poverty, ignorance, and hunger. In the present age, there are just as many incidents as a result of idleness and boredom on the part of those unsuited for work. In addition, there are still conflicts of interest, and these disputes can escalate between even the most balanced individuals and groups. Various professionals from career counsellors to teachers, arbitrators, ombudsmen and psychiatrists work to prevent incidents. Lawyers, police, judges, and all of the other trappings of law and process are still required when they fail. Theoretically a single SI:>1 could manage these matters for a whole society of nearbaseline intelligences, but in practice most seem to feel they have better things to do, or perhaps that sapient level beings are healthiest when they see to these matters themselves.
Likewise, while direct AIcracy by higher trans-sapients is an option, many areas of Sephirotic space allow or even require that communities govern themselves. Therefore politics at every scale from neighbourhood and community to nation, planet, or clade is another common occupation (and for the non-specialist, sometimes a preoccupation). Bureaucrats and administrators (often, but not necessarily AIs who were originally designed for these jobs) are required, and of course various other elected and appointed officials also manage the day-to-day and decade-to-decade affairs of their polity, whatever its size.
Raising children (or the equivalent) is another major occupation, or preoccupation, of many Sephirotic sapients. On the face of it this would seem surprising, since given the very slow growth rate of settled regions juveniles are a small proportion of the population, but given the complexity of society the task itself is enormous and requires the work of many. Moreover, the right to bear or raise children is a mark of great achievement and high status. Not only are the genetic parents or constructors involved, but so too are co-designers, relatives such as aunts, uncles, elder siblings, cousins grandparents and great-grandparents (or equivalents), teachers and tutors or other programmers, neighbours and other community members and the like. Some of these, if their performance is sufficiently impressive, may earn the right to greater involvement in the process, and may even be allowed to design, bear, or engender children of their own.
Finally there are two great tasks which the transapients often, for inscrutable reasons of their own, leave partly or entirely in the hands of sapient beings: terraforming, and provolution work. These projects can consume the energies and attention of entire societies for hundreds or thousands of years, and at the sapient level hundreds of specialities and subspecialities are required in addition to the work of coordinating the effort itself. This sort of work is as highly regarded as the business of the raising of the next generation.
Members of the Sephirotic societies may be idle, and there are those who choose to remain so for most or all of their lives, but if so it is not for lack of opportunity.
