While I have regularly pointed out that commerce uniquely provides the roadways and the potential roles in society for people to find their individual authenticity, I want to make this more explicit.
I have followed the list of occupations that the United States government created in 1938, revised in the 1960s and again in the 1970s. It began as a few thousand occupations. It expanded to tens of thousands of occupations and by the 1970s there were hundreds of thousands of occupations.
The original conception of the job with an occupational title was derived from union shops and the military where such finite and describable job functions have existed for a century or more.
The government finally gave up trying to categorize occupations sometime 30 years ago. The reason is simple. Not only do we have so many occupations in our commercial world, we have transcended occupations to the point where they rarely described work or activity of an individual in the workplace.
Moreover, job descriptions in this sense are irrelevant. People rapidly assume new responsibilities and new functions as a business shifts and as the individual’s talents expand.
Occupations are a small part of human work activity in the United States.
Today, it is entirely possible to do what I do. Began every day figuring out what I want to do that day, often a dozen or more things. Doing this I am able to generate income, over time, with some subset of all the many things I do. I act from my own internal demands and some of them generate income.
I am able to support myself because the commercial world is so vast that it can find a useful and productive function and an income generating function for some of the many activities I engage in.
I am not alone. There are several million people able to live as I do. We don't start with any trust funds or assets to fall back on.
It is into this commercial world that individual arts, skills and talents are brought. It is this commercial world that allows for individuals to be authentic.
Other worlds of government, military and religion offer a few niches for authenticity to be expressed. But commerce uniquely provides an infinite number of such authentic income generating niches.