Where the work comes from

A young man in Tanta looks after the older people on his street. He sets up their phones, pays their bills, books their clinic appointments, renews the paperwork that now has to be done on a screen, and sits with them until they are confident enough to try it alone.

There was no vacancy for this. Nobody advertised it. A few years ago the role would not have made sense to anyone on his street. Now several families pay him every month, and a couple of others are waiting.

It is tempting to think of jobs as fixed places, like chairs in a room, and of a career as the hunt for an empty one. But that picture gets the cause backwards. A job exists because someone is producing more value than they are paid. Their grown-up children save days of queues and worry, worth far more than the fee. The parents keep their independence. He keeps the rest. Three parties better off, and the job is simply the shape that arrangement takes.

Seen that way, most work that exists today was invented by somebody noticing a gap and filling it, often before anyone had a name for it. That is why there are so many more kinds of job now than a generation ago, and why so many people hold one that did not exist when they were at school.

It also changes the question worth asking. Not which openings are available, but where something useful is not yet being done, for people who would gladly pay to have it done.

Find that, and the job tends to follow.